THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS,  CHICAGO,  ILLINOIS 

THE  BAKER  &  TAYLOR  COMPANY,  NEW  YORK 

THE  CAMBRIDGE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  LONDON  „„,„., 

™E  ^RUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA,  TOKYO.  OSAKA.  KYOTO.  FUKUOKA.  SENDAl 
THE  MISSION  BOOK  COMPANY,  SHANGHAI 


THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

MODERN  MEN  AND 
MODERN  METHODS 


BY 

JOSEPH  PENNELL 

N.A. 

AUTHOR  OF  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 
SERIES,  MODERN  ILLUSTRATION 
THE  ILLUSTRATION  OF  BOOKS 


THE  SCAMMON  LECTURES  FOR  1920  PUBLISHED 
FOR  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO  BY  THE 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS  CHICAGO  ILLINOIS 


i^oi  e)-<\ 


COPYRIGHT  1921  BY  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED  PUBLISHED  NOVEMBER  192 1 
COMPOSED  AND  PRINTED  BY  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF 
CHICAGO  PRESS  CHICAGO  ILLINOIS  U.S.A. 


n  1  0 

P3S  ^ 


NOTE.— th;-  lectures  presented  in  this  volume  comprise 

THE  sixteenth  SERIES  DELIVERED  AT  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF 
CHICAGO  ON  THE  SCAMMON  FOUNDATION.  THE  SCAMMON 
LECTURESHIP  IS  ESTABLISHED  ON  AN  AMPLE  BASIS  BY  BEQUEST 
OF  MRS.  MARIA  SHELDON  SCAMMON,  WHO  DIED  IN  1901.  THE 
WILL  PRESCRIBES  THAT  THE  LECTURES  SHALL  BE  UPON  THE 
HISTORY,  THEORY,  AND  PRACTICE  OF  THE  FINE  ARTS  (MEANING 
THEREBY  THE  GRAPHIC  AND  PLASTIC  ARTS)  BY  PERSONS  OF 
DISTINCTION  OR  AUTHORITY  ON  THE  SUBJECT  ON  WHICH 
THEY  LECTURE,  SUCH  LECTURES  TO  BE  PRIMARILY  FOR  THE 
BENEFIT  OF  THE  STUDENTS  OF  THE  ART  INSTITUTE,  AND 
SECONDARILY  FOR  MEMBERS  AND  OTHER  PERSONS.  THE 
LECTURES  ARE  KNOWN  AS  "THE  SCAMMON  LECTURES." 


PREFACE 

THIS  volume  is  a  report  in  shorthand  of  the 
Scammon  Lectures  as  I  gave  them  at  the 
Chicago  Art  Institute,  April,  1 920.  If,  there- 
fore, the  book  seems  to  be  talked  instead  of  writ- 
ten, it  is  what  I  want,  what  I  said,  what  I  have 
learned,  what  I  believe.  It  was  inevitable,  however, 
by  this  method,  that  there  should  be  repetitions,  and 
references  to  subjects  and  slides  shown  at  the  lec- 
tures which  do  not  appear  in  the  pages.  I  have 
referred  to  this  in  the  Introduction,  and  also  said 

^    that  I  wished  to  make  the  book  in  this  fashion.     I 

y  have  done  so.  It  is  myself.  And  though  talked 
in  six  hours,  it  has  taken  sixty  years  to  get  together. 
I  hope  students  may  be  induced  to  believe  as  I  do — 
for  I  know  if  they  do,  they  will  not  be  led  astray,  as 

^n  they  often  are,  by  blatant  bellowings,  by  mechani- 
•  cal  makeshifts,  by  the  false  prophets  shrieking  that 
T  anyone  can  be  an  artist,  especially  if  he  attend  a 
correspondence  college  or  a  get-rich-quick  school  run 
by  these  prophets  or  their  friends;  and  people  who 
tell  you  that  art  can  exist  without  craft — handicraft — 
and  the  most  skilled  craft,  are  false  prophets. 

I  hope  that  the  book  may  lead  students  back  to 
the  straight,  hard,  and  narrow  path  from  which  in 

'  n  these  last  years  they  have  so  sadly  strayed.  I  hope 
that  it  may  prove  to  them  that  the  Graphic  Arts  are 
as  serious  as  any  of  the  other  arts.  I  hope  that  it 
may  show  them  or  point  out  to  them  the  master- 
pieces of  the  Graphic  Arts,  and  that  without  work, 
belief,  and  knowledge  we  can  do  nothing,  despite  the 
difficulty-dodgers  of  this  artless,  aimless,  shiftless 
age,  who  are  the  curse  of  the  age,  the  hope  of  the 
lazy  and  the  unfit,  who  look  to  art  for  an  easy  living, 
not  as  a  most  difficult  profession. 


viii  PREFACE 

I  have  spoken  of  the  crying  need  for  a  national 
department  of  art,  a  national  school  of  art,  national 
encouragement  of  art.  The  politicians  are  too  igno- 
rant to  encourage  art  now,  but  they  will  when  they 
are  made  to  see  it  will  pay. 

It  is  the  highbrows,  the  intellectuals,  the  ama- 
teurs, and  the  uplifters  who  have  grabbed  art  in 
our  country.  They  are  afraid  of  national  art, 
national  art  education,  for  even  they  know  that  if 
art  became  a  national  factor  they  would  lose  their 
jobs — and  rightly — of  teaching  and  preaching  what 
they  cannot  practice. 

There  are  art  schools  that  are  taking  up  practical 
art  and  craft  education,  and  there  are  artists  who 
are  teaching  practically  their  trades,  but  many  are 
doing  harm  to  students,  telling  them  how  to  make 
big  money  quick,  and  that  is  the  aim  of  the  people 
of  this  country — ignorant  that  art  is  the  most 
difficult  and  most  underpaid  profession  in  the  world. 
It  is,  however,  for  money  that  the  immigrant  comes, 
and  the  American  still  exists  here.  They  know  no 
better,  but  art  is  dying  of  thirst  in  a  dry  desert. 
And  we  have  no  graphic  art  and  craft  school  properly 
equipped  in  the  country. 

Joseph  Pennell 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS xi 

MODERN  MEN  AND  MODERN  METHODS.     IN- 
TRODUCTION      I 

ILLUSTRATION.     WOOD  CUTTING  AND  WOOD 

ENGRAVING 5 

ILLUSTRATION.     MODERN  METHODS  ...  55 

ETCHING.    THE  ETCHERS 135 

ETCHING.     THE  METHODS 187 

LITHOGRAPHY.     THE  ARTISTS 217 

LITHOGRAPHY.    THE  METHODS      ....  275 

INDEX 309 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


INTRODUCTION  page 

The  Scribe Headpiece 

FIRST  LECTURE 

The  Early  Printer  at  Work  at  His  Press    .  Headpiece 

Page  from  Manuscript  Bible,  Thirteenth  Century. 
English 

St.    Christopher.     First   Wood    Block,    Printed    in 

Germany,  1423 

Wood  and  Metal  Plates  and  Tools  Used  in  Engraving 

Modern  Multiple  Hoe  Printing  Press  . 

The  Ryerson  Library,  The  Art  Institute  of  Chicago 

Hypnerotomachia  (Poliphili) 

Albrecht  DiJRER:   An  Angel  Appearing  to  Joachim 
A   Scribe  at  Work.     Illumination    from   Eleventh 

Century  Manuscript 

Piccolomini  Library,  Siena 

Rembrandt:  Drawing  in  Pen  and  Wash 

Claude  Lorrain:  Pen  and  Wash  Drawing     . 

Miniature  from  Early  Manuscript 

William  Blake:   The  Morning  Stars  Sang  Together 

Thomas  Bewick:  The  Woodcock        .... 

Edward  Calvert:  The  Plowman       .... 

Adolph  von  Menzel:  The  Round  Table  at  Sans  Souci 

J.  L.  E.  Meissonier:  From  "Les  Contes  Remois". 

Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti:  The  Palace  of  Art 

W.  HoLMAN  Hunt:  The  Lady  of  Shalott 

Frederick  Sandys:  The  Old  Chartist     . 

George  du  Maurier:  From  "Punch" 

Sir  John  Everett  Millais:  The  Sower  . 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  Bowl  and  Jar 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  The  Major's  Daughter 

A.  B.  Houghton:  The  Tombs 

Randolph  Caldecott:  The  Mad  Dog 

Lord  Leighton:  Samson  Carrying  Off  the  Gates 

Sir  John  Tenniel:  From  "Alice  in  Wonderland" 


21 

22 

25 
26 

26 
27 
28 
28 
31 
3^ 
35 
36 
39 
39 
40 

41 

42 

45 
46 

47 
47 


xii  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

English  Village,  from  "A  Round  of  Days"  by  G.  L 

Penwell  and  I.  W.  North 48 

Charles  Keene:  The  Unrecognized  Visitor         .        .        51 
Timothy   Cole:    Head   of   Flora,   from   Botticelli's 

"Spring" 52 

Old  Hand  Press  .        .      ' .  .    Tailpiece 


second  lecture 
Japanese  Wood  Cutter  at  Work 
Hiroshige:  The  Falling  Rocket 
Japanese  Printer  at  Work 
Bird.    Japanese  Color  Print 
Edgar  Wilson:  Fish 

E.  Manet:  Illustration  for  Poe's  "Raven" 
Walter  Crane:    Color  Print  for  "Beauty  and  the 
Beast" 

F.  MoRLEY  Fletcher:    Meadow  Sweet.     Key  Block 
AND  Finished  Print 
Emil  Orlik:  The  Seamstress 
Gustave  Baumann:  The  Landmark 
Arthur     Rackham:      Cinderella.     Silhouettes    and 

Wash  . 

William  Nicholson:  London  Types  . 

Auguste  Lepere:  Notre  Dame;  Le  Soir 

F.  Valloton:  The  Burial 

Rockwell  Kent:  Cain  .... 

Mariano  Fortuny:    Study,  from  Dariller's  "Life  of 

Fortuny"  

Martin  Rico:  A  Venetian  Canal 

Daniel  Vierge:    The   University 

Robert  Blum:  Joe  Jefferson     . 

A.  Brennan:  Stairway,  Chantilly 

Alfred  Parsons:    Title-Page   from  "She  Stoops  to 

Conquer" 

W.  Morris:  The  Kelmscott  Chaucer 

Howard  Pyle:   Title  and  Illustration  from  "Robin 

Hood"        


Headpiece 

SI 

61 
62 
63 


64 

64 

67 
68 

69 

70 

73 
74 

75 

76 
81 
82 

83 
84 


90 
93 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS  xiii 

William  Morris'  Printing  Shop  at  Hammersmith        .  93 

Elihu  Vedder:    Illustration  from  "Omar  Khayyam"  94 

Joseph  Sattler:  Der  Wunderfarber       ....  97 
Aubrey      Beardsley:       Illustration      for      "  Morte 

d'Arthur" 98 

Carlos  Schwabe:   Cover  and  Title  for  "Le  Reve"  .  loi 

R.  Anning  Bell:  Jack  the  Giant-Killer  102 

A.  B.  Frost:  Our  Cat  Eats  Rat  Poison  ....  105 

Phil  May:  The  Parson 106 

Paul   Renouard:    A   Purveyor   of   Liquid   Refresh- 
ments FOR  Anarchists iii 

F.  Walter  Taylor:  The  Nurse in 

E.J.Sullivan:  "Sartor  Resartus" 112 

C.  B.  Falls:  The  Eagle 117 

Franklin  Booth:  Pen  Drawing  for  Newspaper  Adver- 
tisement      118 

Advertisement  from  "Jugend" 119 


Joseph  Pennell:  Steam  Shovel,  Panama 
F.  Walter  Taylor:  Charcoal  Portrait  . 
Modern  Multiple  Hoe  Printing  Press  . 
Old  Hand  Press  for  Printing  Wood  Cuts     . 

THIRD  LECTURE 

A.  Bosse:  Etchers  at  Work  .  .  .  . 
Albrecht  Durer:  The  Cannon  .... 
Rembrandt:  The  Gold  Weigher's  Field 

Rembrandt:  The  Mother 

Whistler:  Annie  Haden 

Rembrandt:  Christ  Presented  to  the  People 

A.  Bosse:  Etchers  at  Work        .... 

A.  Van  Dyck:  Franciscus  Snyders    . 

A.  Bosse:  The  Printer  at  Work 

Thomas  Rowlandson:  The  Sofa 

J.  M.  W.  Turner:   The  Junction  of  the  Severn 

t^e  Wye 

F.  Goya:  The  Witches,  from  "The  Caprices" 


120 

127 

.      128 

Tailpiece 

Headpiece 

139 

140 

145 
145 
146 

152 

155 

155 
156 


xiv  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

J,  M.  W.  Turner:  St.  Catherine's  Hill.     Etching  and 

Mezzotint 159 

C.  Meryon:  The  College  Henri  Quatre               .  160 

F.  Seymour  Haden:   Sunset  in  Ireland  160 

F.  Seymour  Haden:  Kilgaren  Castle      ....  163 

F.  Seymour  Haden:  Hands  Etching         .        .  163 

F.  Duveneck:  The  Rialto 164 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  Black  Lion  Wharf  .164 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  Weary 171 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  Annie  Haden  in  the  Big  Hat  .  172 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  The  Doorway,  Venice  175 

Whistler  at  His  Press 176 

Mary  Cassatt:  Mother  and  Child 179 

F.  Buhot:  Country  Neighbors 180 

A.  Zorn:  Portrait  of  Renan 180 

A.  Lepere.     Cathedrale  d'Amiens,  Jour  d'Inventaire  183 

MuiRHEAD  Bone:  Orvieto 184 

Frank  Brangwyn:  Etching 184 

The  Etcher Tailpiece 

FOURTH  LECTURE 

Mathey:  Portrait  of  Felicien  Rops        .        .  Headpiece 

M.  Lalanne:  Soft  Ground  Etchings        .        .  193 

F.  Rops:  The  Devil  over  Paris 194 

Louis  Le  Grand:  Maternity 195 

M.  Lalanne:    Plate  Printed  Clean   (Left);    Wiped 

WITH  A  Tint  (Right) 196 

Etching  Press  Designed  and  Made  by  Mr.  Lee  Sturgis 

OF  Chicago 213 

P.  Rajon:  Bracquemond,  the  Etcher      .        .        .        .214 

FIFTH  LECTURE 

Henri  Toulouse-Lautrec:  The  Printer         .  Headpiece 

Franz  Hanfstaengl:  Portrait  of  Senefelder  223 

Samuel  Prout:  The  Pump 224 

Title-Page  of  the  "Grammar  of  Lithography"  .        .     225 
F.  Goya:  The  Bull  Fight 226 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS  xv 

A.  Raffet:  Ils  grognaient  MAIS  ils  suivaienttoujours  226 

T,  Charlet:  Tireurs  de  la  Compagnie  Infernale       .  229 

R.  Bonington:  Rue  du  Gros-Horloge      ....  230 

E.  Isabey:  Return  to  Port 233 

H.  Daumier:  Rue  du  Transnonain 233 

A.  Gavarni:  Pere  Vireloque 234 

E.  Delacroix:  A  Lion  of  the  Atlas         ....  235 

Fantin-Latour:  Symphony 235 

Fantin-Latour:  Roses 236 

A.  VON  Menzel:  The  Garden 239 

Edouard  Manet:  Portrait  de  femme       ....  24O 

F.  Rops:  The  Lace  Expert 241 

F.  Rops:  Reading  the  Missal 242 

Henri  Martin:  The  Vision 247 

A.  Favre:  On  les  aura! 248 

Th.  Steinlen:  18  Mars 249 

J.  L.  Forain:  The  Letter 250 

J.  A.  McN.  Whistler:  Portrait  of  Joseph  Pennell  257 
W.  Rothenstein:   Portrait  of  Charles  Ricketts  and 

C.  H.  Shannon 258 

F.  Brangwyn:  Porters 259 

Muirhead  Bone:  The  Shipyard          260 

Spencer  Pryse:  Belgium 263 

C.  W.  Nevinson:  The  Road 264 

Marius  a.  F.  Bauer:  The  Sphinx 265 

C.  B.  Falls:  Poster 266 

Joseph  Pennell:  Doorway,  Rouen 269 

George  Bellows:  The  Murder  of  Edith  Cavell        .  270 

The  Printers   .        .        . Tailpiece 

SIXTH  LECTURE 

Lithographic  Press Headpiece 

The  Beggarstaff  Brothers:  Irving  as  Becket    .  283 

R.  Anning  Bell:  School  Poster 284 

Th.  Steinlen:  Poster 285 

Joseph  Pennell  at  Work  on  a  Lithograph    .        .  286 


xvi  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

George  W.  Eggers:    Drawing  and  Lithograph  Print 

FROM  It "-> 

Hans  Unger:  Head ^9^ 

Allen  Philbrick:    Drawing  on  Paper  and  Print  from 

It  Transferred  to  Stone ^97 

Aubrey  Beardsley:  Poster 298 

Lithographic  Press Tailpiece 


PAGE  11      THE  SCRIBE:  DRAWING  FROM  MANUSCRIPT 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  MODERN  MEN 
AND  MODERN  METHODS  INTRODUC- 
TION 

I  LEARN  that  these  lectures  are  primarily  in- 
tended for  students,  according  to  the  terms  of 
the  Scammon  Bequest,  and  it  is  to  students, 
therefore,  that  I  wish  primarily  to  address  myself. 
In  previous  years  several  authorities  have  discussed 
certain  aspects  and  forms  of  the  Graphic  Arts.  But 
these  addresses  have  been  mostly  devoted  to  the 
history  of  the  Arts,  to  the  work  of  the  past — "made 
out  of  books,"  as  one  lecturer  has  said,  rather  than 
out  of  experience  and  practice  of  men  of  the  present. 
I  believe  that  we  should  study  the  work  of  our 
predecessors,  for  unless  we  know  what  has  been 
done,  and  the  methods  by  which  it  has  been  done  in 
the  past,  we  cannot  know  whether  we  are  carrying  on 


2  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  great  traditions  on  which  all  great  art  is  founded; 
we  cannot  know  whether  we  are  advancing,  whether 
we  are  re-echoing  the  past,  whether  we  are  standing 
still,  or  whether  we  are  degenerating. 

There  was  one  notable  exception  among  these 
lecturers,  who  have  taken  the  Graphic  Arts  as  their 
subject — the  late  F.  Hopkinson  Smith,  on  Outdoor 
Sketching.  Mr.  Smith  was  an  able,  practical  expo- 
nent of  this  form  of  art.  Mr.  Smith,  however, 
treated  only  one  phase  of  a  great  subject.  Mr. 
Carrington  treated  another  in  Engravers  and  Etchers. 
Mr.  Smith's  lectures  were  the  result  of  a  life 
passed  in  practicing  what  he  preached;  Mr.  Carring- 
ton's  were  made  from  the  books  and  prints  he 
has  studied.  Both  were  valuable  documents.  I 
wish,  however,  to  try  to  combine  them,  though 
I  shall  confine  myself  to  modern  Graphic  Art,  to 
modern  men  and  modern  methods,  especially  to  the 
men  who  have  carried  on  the  traditions  of  the  past 
and  applied  them  to  the  methods  of  the  present. 
For  it  is  impossible  in  this  world — or  what  was  the 
world — to  create  anything  new,  to  be  original.  We 
can  only  carry  on.  But  in  every  art  and  craft  the 
men  who  have  carried  on  are  called  inventors, 
creators,  original,  when  they  are  only  intelligent  stu- 
dents of  the  past  who  have  advanced  their  art  one 
step  in  their  own  age  by  adapting  the  work  of  the 
past  to  their  own  needs.  I  wish  also  to  include  in 
the  Graphic  Arts  only  Drawing,  Engraving,  and 
Printing,  not  all  forms  of  art,  save  Sculpture  and 
Architecture,  as  Hamerton  did  in  his  great  book  on 
The  Graphic  Arts. 

Nor  am  I  going  into  the  history  of  the  Graphic 
Arts  to  any  extent;  but  there  are  great  landmarks 
in  the  past  that  I  must  refer  to.    There  is  the  wood 


INTRODUCTION  3 

cutting  of  the  Japanese  from  which  we  have  learned 
so  much  and  must  learn  much  more,  or  the  Chinese 
from  whom  the  Japanese  learned  everything.  There 
are  the  old  German  and  Italian  draughtsmen,  en- 
gravers, and  printers,  some  of  whom  are  still  our 
masters  and  our  inspiration;  some  of  whom  we  have 
not  surpassed,  nor  even  approached.  Still,  unless 
we  have  a  knowledge  of  those  masters  of  the  past 
and  their  methods,  we  can  make  no  progress  in  the 
present.  And  it  is  these  modern  methods  and  the 
men  who  intelligently  use  them  today  that  I  wish 
to  discuss.  It  is  impossible  for  me  to  refer  to  every 
eminent  illustrator  in  these  lectures — and  still  more 
impossible  to  include  the  work  of  all  to  whom  I 
have  referred. 

I  wish  to  thank  the  Trustees  of  the  Art  Insti- 
tute for  the  honor  they  have  done  me  by  inviting  me 
to  deliver  the  Scammon  Lectures.  To  thank  the 
Director,  Mr.  Eggers,  and  other  officials  of  the 
Institute  and  especially  Miss  McGovern,  who  have 
so  greatly  aided  me  in  preparing  the  illustrations 
for  the  lectures,  reproduced  in  this  volume.  In 
fact,  on  this  and  other  occasions,  I  have  only  to 
thank  everyone  connected  with  the  Institute  with 
whom  I  have  come  in  contact.  And  finally  I  only 
hope  the  lectures  may  be  of  some  benefit  to  the 
students. 
Chicago,  April  22,  1920  Joseph  Pennell 


Author's  Note:  A  number  of  prints  and  drawings  are 
referred  to  in  the  text  which  were  shown  as  lantern  slides  but  are 
not  published  in  the  volume.  Many  of  these  are  in  the  Ryerson 
Library  and  the  Print  Room  of  the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago. 


PAGE  16      THE  EARLY  PRINTER  AT  WORK  AT  HIS  PRESS. 
TEMPORARY  WOOD  CtJT 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  ILLUSTRATION 
WOOD  CUTTING  AND  WOOD  ENGRAVING 
FIRST    LECTURE    TUESDAY    APRIL    6    1920 

IT  is  stated  that  one  of  the  functions  of  the 
Scammon  Lectures  is  that  they  are  primarily 
intended  for  students,  and  if  I  can  address 
myself  to  you  as  students  this  afternoon — for  we 
are  all  students,  and  we  must  be  to  the  end  of  the 


6  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

chapter — I  shall  have  succeeded  in  doing  some- 
thing— something  worth  doing. 

One  of  the  previous  lecturers  in  this  series  said 
on  one  occasion  that  it  was  his  duty  never  to  be 
original,  but  to  get  everything  he  had  to  say  out  of 
books,  I  do  not  believe  in  being  original.  There  is 
no  such  thing  as  originality  in  this  world.  The  only 
thing  we  can  do  is  to  carry  on  tradition.  But  when 
it  comes  to  taking  facts  that  I  have  to  put  be- 
fore you  out  of  books,  it  is  rather  difficult,  because 
there  are  few  books  on  the  graphic  arts,  although 
all  the  work  which  I  shall  refer  to  is  printed,  and 
the  greater  part  of  it  has  appeared  in  books.  But 
about  those  books,  or  rather  the  illustrations  in  them, 
very  little  comparatively  has  been  written;  written, 
that  is,  by  the  men  who  made  them.  Nor  did  most 
of  the  draughtsmen  and  engravers  describe  their 
methods  of  work. 

There  are  today  endless  ways  of  reproducing 
and  printing  illustrations.  Artists  seem  to  think 
that  anything  can  be  reproduced  and  printed  without 
any  training,  without  any  technical  knowledge,  with- 
out any  thought  of  the  chemical,  photographic,  or 
engraving  and  printing  problems  which  are  involved, 
but  in  every  print,  in  every  book,  when  the  results  are 
not  good,  the  artist  is  blamed.  And  this  Is  not  sur- 
prising, because  the  artists  of  America  mostly  know 
nothing  about  the  crafts;  yet  the  engravers  know 
little,  and  the  printers  do  not  care,  most  of  them. 
This  condition  of  affairs  has  been  brought  about 
because  of  the  lack  of  proper  technical  art  schools  in 
this  country  and  a  want  of  interest  in  technique  on 
the  part  of  artists,  and  it  is  the  want  of  technical 
schools  which  we  must  fill.  Until  this  Institute  can 
do  something  besides  teach  the  fine  arts,  so  called,  it 


ILLUSTRATION  7 

really  will  have  done  very  little  to  advance  the 
graphic  arts.  There  is  coming  in  this  world  a  great 
war  in  art,  a  war  as  great  as  the  commercial  war 
now  upon  us.  We  are  going  to  have  to  fight  in 
the  immediate  future  not  only  our  enemies  but  our 
allies,  and  they  are  trained  craftsmen,  and  unless 
we  are  prepared  to  take  up  nationally  the  teaching 
of  the  graphic  arts  and  the  applied  arts  and  the 
industrial  arts,  our  enemies  and  our  friends  are 
going  to  do  our  art  work  for  us,  and  this  country 
artistically  will  be  wiped  off  the  face  of  the  earth. 
If  we  want  a  National  Art  we  must  have  a  National 
Art  School,  a  National  Department  of  Art,  and  a 
National  Secretary  of  Art,  or  stop  cackling  of  Art. 

I  propose  to  show  what  has  been  done  in  the 
past  by  Americans  and  what  has  been  done  by 
foreigners  as  well,  not  only  by  Americans,  for  though 
I  am  proud  to  be  an  American,  but  scarcely 
proud  of  my  country  or  of  most  of  the  inhabitants 
of  it  today,  I  do  not  believe  that  in  art  we  are 
bounded  by  the  limits  of  the  United  States,  by 
ignorance  of  other  men  and  other  methods,  or  by 
any  other  limits.  We  must  know  what  has  been 
done  in  the  past  and  in  other  lands  in  order  to  know 
how  to  do  better  work  in  the  present,  and  in  order 
to  do  that  work  we  must  be  properly  trained  and 
prepared.  But  today  conceited  amateur  ignorance 
covers  this  part  of  the  globe.  A  belief  that  we 
are  the  elect  has  blinded  us. 

You  may  say,  and  several  people  have  said, 
that  the  graphic  arts  are  a  very  broad  and  a  very 
wide  subject.  Some  writers  have  grouped  among 
the  graphic  arts  all  arts  except  sculpture  and  archi- 
tecture. I  am  not  so  desirous  of  extending  the 
borders;    in  fact,  I  have  not  time,  and  you  would 


8  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

not  have  time  to  listen  to  me  if  I  made  such  a  mis- 
take as  to  do  so.  All  I  want  to  talk  to  you  about 
is  what  I  think,  what  I  know,  are  rightly  considered 
to  be  the  graphic  arts.  These  are  the  arts  of  drawing, 
engraving,  and  printing,  in  their  various  forms,  and 
these  forms  are  very  numerous,  and  if  you  students 
are  going  to  practice  them  you  cannot  practice 
them  out  of  your  heads  without  technical  knowl- 
edge. You  cannot  use  your  imagination  instead 
of  technical  training.  You  must  have  skilled  tech- 
nical training  in  order  to  do  your  work,  and  today 
in  this  country  you  cannot  get  it.  You  must 
become  workmen.  You  may  have  genius,  you 
may  have  ability,  but  it  will  do  you  no  good,  unless 
you  are  practically  trained  craftsmen,  and  that 
you  must  be  before  you  can  do  anything  of  any 
value  in  the  arts  and  crafts.  If  you  have  learned 
only  to  draw  and  paint  you  cannot  express  your- 
selves in  the  graphic  arts  at  all.  You  may  get 
the  results  that  you  see  in  the  newspapers  and 
magazines — and  those  newspapers  and  most  of  the 
magazines  and  nearly  all  the  books  are  a  disgrace 
to  civilization,  because  of  their  technical  imperfec- 
tions in  illustration,  engraving,  and  printing. 

I  am  not  going  into  the  history  of  the  graphic 
arts.  I  mean  I  am  not  going  back  to  the  very 
beginning  of  things  because  I  have  not  the  time, 
and  I  should  bore  you  with  inartistic  facts  and 
artless  figures.  I  only  want  to  show  you  what  I 
consider,  what  I  know,  to  be  great  art  and  good 
art,  but  talking  and  showing  and  listening  will  not 
make  artists  out  of  you;  only  hard  work  will  do 
that. 

The  graphic  arts  have  been  practiced  from  the 
very  beginning  of  time.     The  Egyptians   and   the 


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PAGE    11       PAGE    FROM    MANUSCRIPT   BIBLE,    THIRTEENTH     CENTURY.       ENGLISH. 
COLLECTION  OF  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


PAGE  12      ST.  CHRISTOPHER.      FIRST  WOOD  BLOCK,  PRINTED  IN 
GERMANY,  1423.      ARTIST  AND  WOOD  CUTTER  UNKNOWN 


ILLUSTRATION  1 1 

Assyrians  were  designing  posters  when  they  carved 
their  reliefs.  But  these  were  so  explanatory  that 
all  could  see  and  understand  without  legends  and 
slogans  and  so  durable  that  they  have  lasted  till 
today.  Wall  paintings  and  sculptured  shrines  were 
books  for  those  who  could  not  read,  and  no  one 
scarce  could  read.  We  who  can  read,  thousands 
of  years  after,  marvel  at  them. 

The  first  persons  who  practiced  what  we  know 
as  the  graphic  arts  were  the  scribes  and  illumi- 
nators, and  here  is  an  early  print  (Page  i)  show- 
ing one  of  those  scribes  at  work.  He  is  working 
in  a  library,  writing  and  illuminating  a  manu- 
script. 

Here  is  a  page  from  an  illuminated  manuscript 
(Page  9),  and  there  is  one  thing  about  it  I  want  to 
point  out  to  you.  William  Morris  and  Walter  Crane 
and  others  who  have  written  of  the  graphic  arts  have 
divided  designs  into  two  classes— decorative  design 
and  realistic  design.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
what  we  today  call  decorative  design,  except  the 
borders  of  this  missal,  was  pure  realism.  Decora- 
tion, what  we  call  decoration,  was  realism  in  the 
past  when  it  was  done.  This  is  proved  by  the  work 
of  the  past,  which  the  artists  treated  as  realistically 
as  they  could.  This  I  maintain  despite  William 
Morris  and  Walter  Crane. 

These  illuminators  and  scribes  wanted  to  multi- 
ply their  designs,  and  in  order  to  do  so  someone — 
nobody  knows  who — at  any  rate  I  do  not — con- 
ceived the  idea  of  taking  a  piece  of  cherry  or  pear 
wood  and  drawing  on  the  side  of  it  and  cutting  all 
the  undrawn-on  parts  of  the  wood  away,  leaving  the 
design  raised  above  the  cut-away  portions,  and 
this  was  wood  cutting.     And  when  ink  was  rubbed 


12  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

on  the  raised  parts  of  the  block,  and  paper  placed 
on  it,  and  pressed  on  the  ink,  and  the  back  of  the 
paper  rubbed,  an  impression,  a  print,  came  off.  This 
block  of  St.  Christopher  (Page  lo)  is  one  of  the  first,  if 
not  the  first,  of  the  wood-cut  blocks.  It  was  done, 
as  you  see,  in  1423.  But  it  all  was  one  single,  solid 
piece  of  wood,  drawing  and  text,  cut  with  a  knife, 
and  in  order  to  print  from  it,  the  standing  lines  were 
inked,  and  when  a  piece  of  paper  was  pressed  on 
these  standing  lines  the  portions  which  were  cut  out 
did  not  receive  ink,  and  when  the  paper  was  rubbed 
on  the  back  the  design  came  off  on  it,  and  that  was 
printing.  I  have  repeated  this,  but  half  of  you 
won't  remember.  However,  it  was  one  solid  design, 
just  as  the  work  of  the  Japanese  wood  cutters  is 
today.  But  the  scribes  and  wood  cutters  were  not 
satisfied  with  that.  They  next  made  books  of 
illustrations  and  text  called  block  books,  a  block 
to  a  page,  and  bound  them. 

But  before  I  go  on  to  the  next  step  I  want  to 
explain,  as  clearly  as  I  can,  the  various  forms  of  print- 
ing surfaces  (Page  13).  Here  is  a  wood  block.  The 
block  originally  was  as  high  as  the  tops  of  these 
points  and  was  cut  away  with  knife  and  chisel, 
leaving  these  points  and  ridges,  which  represent 
lines  and  dots  drawn  on  the  block,  standing  in 
relief.  The  next  form  of  engraving  was  on  metal. 
In  that,  instead  of  leaving  the  lines  in  relief,  the 
engraver  dug  holes  and  pits  and  dots  into  the  metal 
plate,  leaving  the  intervening  spaces  standing  in- 
stead of  cutting  them  away,  as  in  the  wood  block. 
The  ink  was  then  rolled  or  dabbed  on  to  the  surface 
of  the  metal,  then  cleaned  off  it,  the  rest  of  the 
ink  remaining  in  the  holes  and  pits,  and  when  a 
piece  of  paper  was  put  on   the  face  of  the  plate, 


J\KJ\.I\ 


vS 


OK. 


*^\p<v>' 


^^'^'^'^^V'^'''^'-'*-'^'-^'**^''^***''''^ 


PAGE  12      WOOD  AND  METAL  PLATES  AND  TOOLS   USED   IN   EN- 
GRAVING.      DRAWN  BY  JOSEPH  PENNELL 


PAGE  19       MODERN  MULTIPLE  HOE  PRINTING  PRESS 


THE  RYERSON  LIBRARY.       THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


ILLUSTRATION  15 

rubbed  or  pressed  with  great'  force,  the  ink  came 
out  of  the  holes  and  adhered  to  the  paper.  That 
is  metal  engraving. 

Another  form  of  metal  engraving  was  when  the 
engraver  made  furrows  in  the  metal,  leaving  the 
upturned  metal  standing.  These  upturned  ridges 
held  ink,  which  gave  added  richness  and  produced 
what  we  called  dry  point.  Another  method  was  to 
cut  off  the  raised  metal,  called  burr,  and  leave  the 
clean  sharp  lines.  These  were  made  with  a  graver, 
and  such  plates  were  metal  engravings.  Or  the  lines 
were  obtained  by  covering  the  plate  with  acid- 
resisting  varnish,  drawing  through  that,  and  biting 
the  exposed  lines  into  the  plate  with  acid,  the  same 
way  as  the  engraver  cut  into  the  plates  with  his 
graver,  and  the  lines  bitten  in  were  filled  with  ink,  the 
surface  cleaned  off,  paper  placed  on  it,  and  under 
pressure  the  ink  came  out  of  the  lines.  This  is 
etching. 

Different  tools  are  employed.  On  the  wood  block 
the  cutting  knife  is  pulled  toward  you.  The  metal 
engraver  held  the  graver  in  his  hand  and  pushed 
it  from  him,  drawing  his  lines  with  it.  The  dry 
point  was  made  with  a  heavy  steel  point,  with  which 
the  line  was  dug,  while  the  etching  needle  is  a 
sharp-pointed  instrument,  the  lines  being  drawn 
through  the  surface  of  the  varnished  plate. 

The  third  and  last  method  is  lithography.  That 
is  surface  printing,  in  which  there  is  no  relief  or 
depression,  but  the  work  is  done  by  chemical 
affinity.  The  design  is  made  on  a  plate  or  stone 
with  greasy  ink.  The  surface  of  the  plate  or  stone 
is  dampened  with  water.  Then  ink  is  rolled  on  it, 
which  will  adhere  to  the  design  only  or  to  those 
parts  which  are  not  dampened,  because  water  repels 


16  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  ink,  which  is  grease,  from  the  undrawn  spaces  and 
the  ink  is  attracted  to  the  greasy  drawing.  When 
a  pifice  of  paper  is  placed  on  the  plate  the  inked 
design  comes  off  on  the  paper.  Lithography  is 
the  simplest  and  most  abused  of  all  the  graphic 
arts  and  is  the  most  wonderful.  I  shall  go  into  a 
detailed  description  of  these  technical  methods 
later,  but  I  want  you  to  understand  at  the  begin- 
ning the  three  ways  in  which  prints  are  made. 

Very  soon  after  the  wood  block  of  St.  Christo- 
pher had  been  done,  someone  conceived  the  idea 
of  cutting  up  the  blocks  and  cutting  each  letter 
separately,  and  then  of  making  casts  of  the  differ- 
ent letters.  These  were  cut  in  metal  and  casts 
made  of  each  letter. 

There  is  one  thing  you  will  have  noticed  about 
these  cuts  of  craftsmen,  and  that  is  the  shops  in 
which  they  work.  I  am  not  a  believer  in  uplift 
and  all  that  kind  of  thing;  but  I  am  a  believer  in  a 
person  having  a  decent  place  to  work  in.  Here  is 
another  workman  working  at  his  trade,  printing. 
(See  headpiece  to  Lecture  i.)  This  is  the  original 
form  of  press  on  which  the  most  beautiful  books  of 
the  past  were  printed.  This  form  of  press  is  used 
today,  for  in  all  the  graphic  arts  we  have  made 
comparatively  little  but  mechanical  improvement, 
except  notably  in  the  application  of  steam  and 
electricity  and  the  increase  of  rate  of  production;  in 
beauty  and  perfection  of  workmanship,  none  at  all. 

Two  of  these  presses  stand  in  the  Plantin  Museum 
in  Antwerp,  which  by  the  grace  of  God  was  not  in- 
jured in  the  cursed  bombardments  of  the  cursed 
war,  and  instead  of  a  union  notice,  there  is  over 
them  the  figure  of  the  Virgin.  You  can  see  the 
bed  on  which  the  type  is  placed,  and  when  it  is 


POLIPHILO  QVIVI NAKK A.CHE  GLI PAKVE  AN> 
COKA  DI  DOKMIKE.ET  ALTRONDE  IN  SOMNO 
RITKOVAKSE  IN  VNA  CON VALLE,LAQVALE  NEL 
FINEER.ASERATADEVNAMIKABILECLAVSVRA 
CVM  VNA  POILTENTOSA  PYR AMIDE, DE  ADMI^ 
RATIONE  DIGNA.ET  VNO  EXCELSOOBELISCO  DE 
SOPRA.LAQVALE  CVM  DILIGENTIA  £T  PIACERE 
S  VBTILMENTE  LA  CONSIDEROE. 


A  SPAVENTEVOLE  SILVA.ET  CONSTI- 
pato  Nemoreeuafo.&gli  primialtri  lochiper  el  dolcc 
,  fomnochefe  haueaperlefcfre&  proftcrnatemebrcdif-' 
fuforeli<3-i,memrouaidi  nouo  in  unopiu  deledabile 
fitoaffaipiiicheelpriccdcnte.Elqualcnon  era  demon 
tihomdi.&crepidinofe  rape  intorniato.nefalcato  di 
ftrumofi  lugi.  Ma  compofitamente  dc  grate  montagniole  dinontro- 
po  altecia.  Siluofe  di  giouam  quercioii,  di  roburi.fraxini  &  Carpi- 
ni  ,6£  di  frondofi  Efculi.&IIice.Sc  ditencn  Coryli,&di  Alni,&:  diTi" 
'lie,&di  Opio.Sideinfrudluofi  Oleaflri.difpofitifccondo  lafpcdode 
gli  arboriferi  Colli, Ecgiu  ai  piano  erano  grate  filuuledialtrifiluatici 

PAGE  19     HYPNEROTOMACHIA  (POLIPHILI).    PHOTOGRAPH  FROM 
THE   EDITION   OF    1499,  IN  THE  NEWBERRY  LIBRARY,  CHICAGO 


PAGE    23       ALBRECHT    DURER:     AN    ANGEL    APPEARING     TO 
JOACHIM.      WOOD   CUT  FROM   "THE  LIFE  OF  THE  VIRGIN" 


ILLUSTRATION  19 

put  there  and  inked  and  paper  laid  on  it,  the  lever 
is  pulled  and  the  impression  is  made,  the  tympan  or 
cover  is  raised  and  the  paper  lifted  off  with  the 
impression  on  it,  and  it  was  in  this  way  that  all  the 
early  books  were  printed.  All  the  work  was  done 
by  hand. 

This  is  an  American  press,  used  today  for  fast 
printing  (Page  13).  The  cut  shows  what  has  been 
done  in  the  development  of  presses.  The  modern 
power  press  is  an  almost  human  machine  that  you 
students,  if  you  wish  to  be  illustrators,  engrav- 
ers, and  printers,  must  learn  something  about, 
and  you  must  have  one  in  the  school  and  learn 
to  print  on  it.  It  is  most  fascinating  to  be  allowed 
to  work  on  one  of  these  machines.  But  unless  you 
get  proper  school  equipment  and  machinery  you 
cannot  do  anything  intelligently  and  practically. 
We  must  have  properly  equipped  schools,  as  they 
have  in  Europe.  In  England  and  Germany,  instead 
of  studying  only  painting  and  sculpture,  in  which 
arts  you  will  probably  never  succeed,  you  students 
can  be  taught  how  to  run  a  machine  of  that  sort, 
how  to  print  and  do  something  useful.  And  when 
a  student  has  learned  a  craft,  like  printing,  he  has 
learned  something  which  is  very  practical,  something 
which  very  few  printers  in  this  country  understand 
themselves.  Yet  printing  is  one  of  the  most  widely 
used  of  the  arts. 

All  those  early  books  were  printed  on  the  tiny 
hand  presses,  and  the  most  beautiful  examples  of 
printing  in  the  world  were  done  on  them. 

This  is  a  page  from  the  Hypnerotomachia^  printed 
in  1 499  in  Venice  (Page  17).  You  have  never  seen 
anywhere  at  any  time  a  more  beautiful  page.  The 
illustration  signed  with  b  is  by  some  attributed  to 


20  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Botticelli.  Other  authorities  say  it  is  the  initial  of 
the  engraver's  name.  And  all  through  the  book  are 
equally  beautiful  designs,  while  the  type  and  the 
arrangement  on  the  page  are  as  perfect  as  anything 
in  printing. 

There  is  one  thing  I  want  to  point  out  to  you — 
the  transition  from  the  old  illumination  to  the  new 
printed  page.  Note  the  little  initial,  a  sort  of  key- 
note put  there,  so  the  illuminator,  who  at  that  time 
had  not  gone  out  of  business,  should  add  beauty  to  the 
decoration  of  the  page  by  drawing  in  the  initial 
letter  over  it;  and  that  scheme  was  carried  on  for 
many  years,  until  the  printers  learned  how  to  print 
letters  in  color,  usually  in  two  colors,  blue  and  red. 
The  blocks  from  which  these  initial  letters  were 
printed  are  preserved  in  the  Mainz  Gutenberg 
Museum.  They  are  made  like  a  jig-saw  puzzle 
and  fitted  together  after  one  had  been  inked  in  blue 
and  the  other  in  red  and  set  in  the  form  with  the 
type  and  then  all  pulled  together. 

These  wonderful  books  are  bound  in  most  gor- 
geous covers,  often  of  gold  and  metal,  with  jewels  and 
wonderful  enamels  inlaid,  and  they  were  placed  in  the 
most  imposing  shrines.  There  is  one  of  these  shrines 
in  the  Piccolomini  Library,  in  the  Cathedral  of  Siena 
(Page  22).  Round  the  walls  are  missals,  while  above 
on  the  walls  are  paintings  by  Pinturecchio.  Another 
beautiful  library  is  at  the  Escorial  near  Madrid,  and 
the  most  interesting  feature  about  that  library  is  that 
the  books,  instead  of  being  placed  with  their  backs 
toward  the  spectator,  are  all  put  in  the  cases  the 
other  way,  with  the  edges  all  gilded,  outward,  and 
the  title  is  written  in  the  corner  in  black.  You 
cannot  imagine  a  more  splendid  gallery  than  that 
wonderful   library  in  the  Escorial.     It  is  a  golden 


A    SCRIBE   AT    WORK. 

MANUSCRIPT.  CAXTON    CLUB.  CHICAGO 


j  TV^-cbMXOjpfiva^  rcrmt 
L^Zferm  digmou  amp  cr 

Lba  fpiffa  fialitfjpbaa 

TTTiagm^art;  vstba^  mm^wTua 

Dau^Daii  f«rft  jpiffa  inftirutot.itnr  oim  ^amoa  20 

ILLUMINATION    FROM    ELEVENTH-CENTURY 


PAGE  20      PICCOLOMINI  LIBRARY,  SIENA 


ILLUSTRATION  23 

glory.  I  know  of  no  library  to  approach  it,  a  solid 
glitter  of  gold  round  the  lower  part,  the  great  paint- 
ings above;  and  it  is  that  sort  of  thing  that  we  must 
work  for  again,  to  get  the  architect,  the  painter, 
and  the  craftsman  again  working  together  to  make 
a  thing  of  beauty  like  this  library. 

The  man  who  really  started  book  illustration 
was  Albrecht  Diirer.  There  are  most  wonderful 
examples  of  his  work  in  the  Apocalypse  and  the 
Passion  in  the  Buckingham  Collection  in  the  Art  In- 
stitute Print  Room  (Page  i8).  He  published  his 
prints  and  books,  among  them  an  alphabet.  He 
not  only  drew  and  engraved  them  and  printed  them, 
but  sold  them,  or,  rather,  he  made  use  of  his  wife  to 
take  them  out  and  sell  them  in  the  market-place, 
and  in  his  Journeys  to  the  Netherlands  and  Italy  he 
gives  most  amusing  and  most  human  accounts  of 
his  experiences  and  adventures. 

Another  great  illustrator  was  Holbein.  He  made 
a  series  of  designs  for  a  Dance  of  Death,  which 
were  copied  and  imitated  all  over  Europe,  for  there 
were  thieves  and  imitators  in  those  days.  His  metal 
engravings  of  decorative  objects  are  very  perfect. 

Here  we  have  a  caricature  of  the  time  of  Diirer. 
I  regret  to  say  that  in  this  country  at  the  present 
time  we  have  no  trained  craftsmen,  and  so  have  no 
trained  cartoonists,  or  much  of  the  work  on  which 
we  have  been  brought  up  would  never  be  printed. 
I  am  afraid  a  caricature  of  this  sort,  if  such  a  carica- 
ture were  published  today,  would  raise  a  row.  There 
was  a  row  then,  and  that  was  intended,  and  it  made 
a  very  big  row.  Now  the  person  caricatured  enjoys 
it;  then  the  caricaturist  was  a  person  to  be  feared. 

If  these  artists  wished  to  draw  as  they  wanted 
to  draw,  without  thought  of  the  wood  cutter  and 


24  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

printer,  they  had  no  way  of  having  their  drawings  re- 
produced, except  by  engraving.  Here  is  an  example, 
you  might  think  it  was  done  by  someone  today, 
a  drawing  by  Rembrandt  (Page  25),  about  as  modern 
as  anything  you  could  find  and  a  splendid  example 
of  technique.  But  there  was  no  way  by  which  Rem- 
brandt could  have  it  reproduced,  and  he  consequently 
was  forced  to  make  etchings,  which  could  not  be 
printed  with  type  and  cannot  even  now.  Of  these 
"The  Descent  from  the  Cross"  is  a  splendid  example. 

Claude  Lorrain,  a  few  years  later,  was  a  great 
draughtsman.  I  do  not  know  of  any  artist  today  who 
could  make  a  more  up-to-date  pen  drawing  than  this 
(Page  26),  which  was  done  by  the  seventeenth-century 
Frenchman,  who  passed  so  many  and  such  busy  years 
in  Rome.  He  too  was  forced  to  etch,  and  he  etched 
vilely,  despite  the  opinion  of  critics.  For  his  own 
pleasure,  however,  he  made  endless  pen  and  wash 
drawings  in  his  Liber  Veritatis^  but  these  were  not 
reproduced  till  the  last  century  in  mezzotint.  The 
drawing  is  like  a  Corot  done  three  hundred  years  ago, 
but  at  that  time  there  was  no  possible  way  of  repro- 
ducing  it. 

Rubens  also  illustrated.  This  design  was  not 
engraved  by  Rubens  himself,  and  there  is  nothing 
of  Rubens  left  in  it,  for  the  engraver  copied  it 
stupidly.  These  drawings  by  Rubens  were  issued 
and  published  from  the  great  Plantin  printing  shop. 
Printing  offices  today  are  filled  with  typewriters  and 
stenographers  and  that  sort  of  thing;  then  thev 
were  filled  with  beauty;  and  if  you  go  into  a  proof- 
readers' room  now  you  usually  see  through  the 
window  the  rapidly  moving  surface  car  or  elevated 
train.  But  in  that  room  at  Plantin's  you  can  see 
with  what  delight  a  man  could  work,  looking  on  a 


PAGE  24       REMBRANDT:     DRAWING  IN  PEN  AND  WASH 


PAGE  24      CLAUDE  LORRAIN:    PEN  AND  WASH  DRAWING 


MINIATURE  FROM  EARLY  MANUSCRIPT.       EDWARD  E.  AYER  COL- 
LECTION,  CHICAGO 


'  <>    ^  '  ^^i^„itWc^'»^i*nflJKki5«Trc'J-W<^.-Kftj!pit5 


^--^''\;^VVl^ea  fke  morn,. 


PAGE  29  WILLIAM  BLAKE:  THE  MORNING  STARS  SANG 
TOGETHER.  FROM  THE  "BOOK  OF  JOB."  ETCHED  BOR- 
DER, ENGRAVED  DESIGN  IN  THE  CENTER 


PAGE  30  THOMAS  BEWICK:  THE  WOODCOCK.  DRAWN  AND 
ENGRAVED  ON  WOOD  BY  BEWICK.  FROM  THE  "HISTORY  OF 
BRITISH  BIRDS" 


PAGE  3  3       EDWARD    CALVERT:    THE    PLOWMAN. 
ENGRAVED  ON  WOOD  BY  CALVERT 


DRAWN  AND 


ILLUSTRATION  29 

quiet  garden,  and  it  was  no  doubt  for  that  reason 
they  had  time  to  design,  print,  and  produce  the 
books  they  did.  The  Plantin  family  were  book- 
sellers too,  and  lived  in  the  works  surrounding  a 
flowering,  arcaded,  quiet  courtyard,  and  were  not 
ashamed.  No  doubt  in  the  evening  they  and  their 
workmen  drank  together  in  the  courtyard;  now  we 
have  stopped  that,  and  mostly  stopped  good  work 
in  consequence.  After  the  Plantins'  great  days, 
there  was  scarcely  any  good  engraving  and  printing 
done  in  Europe  and  none  over  here. 

The  next  man  of  power  was  William  Blake,  and 
Blake,  like  all  his  predecessors,  was  a  trained  crafts- 
man. Here  is  one  of  his  books,  a  most  wonderful 
book,  the  Book  of  Job  (Page  27),  which  you  will  find  in 
the  library,  or,  rather,  a  reproduction  of  it.  In  this 
design  and  in  all  his  other  designs  he  combined  two 
methods — the  design  itself  was  etched  or  engraved, 
and  below  in  the  text  he  used  another  method, 
really  a  new  one  in  its  way.  The  legend  was  written 
by  Blake  on  the  metal  plate  with  some  sort  of 
acid-resisting  varnish  made  up  like  ink,  and  he  bit 
both  parts  at  the  same  time  and  did  something 
which  was  more  or  less  original.  Blake's  works 
are  among  the  greatest  of  masterpieces.  Finally 
they  were  colored  by  his  wife,  wives  then  having 
something  more  to  do  than  vote  and  play  tennis. 

Another  artist  who  appeared  about  the  same 
time  as  Blake  was  Thomas  Bewick,  also  an  English- 
man, and  he  had  an  idea  that  he  could  adopt  and 
adapt  the  methods  and  tools  of  metal  engraving  to 
wood,  that  is,  instead  of  using  metal  plates  on 
which  to  engrave  his  designs  he  could  engrave  them 
on  wood,  using  the  graver  to  cut  the  white  lines  in 
the  block,  engraving  the  design  in  white  lines  on  the 


30  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

cross-section  of  a  piece  of  boxwood.  This  engrav- 
ing of  a  bird  (Page  28)  is  from  one, of  his  numerous 
books,  his  History  of  British  Birds ^  and  in  the  engrav- 
ing you  see  in  a  certain  primitive  kind  of  way  the 
great  skill  that  the  man  had  to  produce  and  to 
reproduce  his  own  design,  for  he  was  not  only  the 
engraver  but  the  artist  and  the  designer  as  well,  and 
that  is  what  all  great  artists  and  engravers  have 
been.  They  have  been  trained  to  do,  and  they  have 
done,  all  their  own  work  with  their  own  hands.  The 
face  of  the  block  was  blackened  and  Bewick  drew 
the  bird  with  his  graver  in  white  lines,  cutting  the 
design  into  the  wood,  and  it  printed  as  it  looked 
on  the  block. 

Metal  engraving  died  hard;  many  artists  during 
the  middle  of  the  last  century  employed  it.  Here 
is  a  design  by  Turner,  probably  from  a  water  color, 
which  was  copied  laboriously  on  to  a  plate  of  steel 
or  copper  and  published  in  Rogers'  Italy.  But 
metal  engraving  died  out  as  a  method  of  illustrating 
books  because,  as  I  have  said,  it  required  two  presses, 
one  for  the  illustration,  another  for  the  text;  and 
gradually  wood  engraving  superseded  it.  After 
Bewick  had  shown  the  way  there  arose  a  school  of 
men  and  women,  pupils  of  Bewick.  Here  is  the 
work  of  one  of  them,  an  enlargement  of  a  part  of  a 
design  by  Benjamin  Robert  Haydon,  engraved  by 
William  Harvey,  and  this  was  engraved  on  wood 
and  printed  with  type,  though  it  is  a  deliberate 
imitation  of  a  metal  engraving.  And  that  is  the 
reason  why  wood  engraving  superseded  work  in 
metal,  which  required  one  press  for  the  letterpress 
and  another  for  the  prints. 

Blake  also  tried  his  hand  at  wood  engraving, 
and  I  cannot  say  that  he  made  a  very  great  success 


PAGE  34  A.  VON  MENZEL:  THE  ROUND  TABLE  AT  SANS 
SOUCI.  WOOD  ENGRAVING  FROM  THE  HISTORY  OF  FRED- 
ERICK THE  GREAT,  1844 


PAGE    34      J.   L.  E.  MEISSONIER:      FROM     "LES    CONTES    REMOIS." 
WOOD   ENGRAVING  BY  LEVEILLE,  1861 


ILLUSTRATION  33 

of  it.  Blake's  wood  engraving  did  not  compare  for 
a  minute  with  that  of  Edward  Calvert,  who  also 
worked  under  or  after  Bewick.  This  is  one  of  the 
most  charming  original  engravings  on  wood  (Page  28), 
done  by  an  artist  almost  unknown,  but  one  who 
worked  with  brilliancy  and  skill.  Calvert  is  one  of 
the  great  names  in  British  art,  although  there  are 
few  designs  by  him,  about  half  a  dozen,  but  each 
is  a  masterpiece.  This  was  engraved  about  1820 
or  1830. 

The  art  of  wood  engraving  spread  from  England 
about  1825  to  France,  and  in  France  it  was  taken 
up,  as  all  new  arts  are,  or  newly  developed  arts, 
by  the  greatest  of  artists.  The  most  important 
book  which  appeared  in  France  was  published  in 
1828  by  Curmer,  an  edition  of  Paul  and  Virginia^ 
which  contained  designs  by  all  the  Romanticists, 
engraved  by  English  men  and  women.  This  design 
was  made  with  a  hard  lead  pencil  by  Charles  Jacque 
on  a  tiny  wood  block  one  and  one-half  or  two  inches 
in  length.  Then  the  engraver  got  hold  of  it  and 
made  what  he  thought  he  should  out  of  it,  and 
that  was  the  end  of  it,  for  the  drawing,  being  made 
on  the  block,  was  all  cut  to  pieces  in  the  process  of 
engraving. 

From  France  the  art  was  carried  to  Germany  and 
was  taken  up  by  the  greatest  of  German  artists, 
Adolph  von  Menzel,  and  his  work  too  was  done  with 
a  hard  lead  pencil  on  the  wood  block,  with  probably 
a  certain  amount  of  wash  in  some  of  the  backgrounds. 
All  that  work  was  done  because  Menzel  loved  it  and 
cared  for  it,  and  it  was  done  so  well  because  he 
knew  his  trade.  Yet  he  had  to  learn  it  himself; 
and  not  only  this,  he  trained  his  own  wood  engravers 
to   follow  his    lines.     His   greatest  work   is  in   the 


34  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Life  of  Frederick  the  Great,"-  but  Menzel  illustrated 
many  books  during  his  long  life.  He  is  the  creator 
of  modern  illustration.  Menzel  told  me  that  al- 
though it  was  the  hardest  work  in  the  world  it  was 
the  most  delightful,  a  positive  proof  that  this  great 
artist  found  nothing  too  big  or  too  little  to  which  to 
devote  his  genius.  Look  at  the  character  in  the 
tiny  heads  of  Frederick  and  Voltaire  and  the  others 
around  the  table,  the  effect  of  moonlight  (Page  31), 
and  in  the  other  design  the  rendering  of  the  retreat 
in  the  snow — they  are  great  art.  There  are  hun- 
dreds of  other  fine  designs  in  the  book. 

Another  man  who  about  the  same  time  was 
working  in  France  was  Meissonier.  His  illustra- 
tions to  Les  Contes  Remois  (Page  32)  will  make  Meis- 
sonier live  long  after  his  paintings  are  forgotten. 
The  names  of  Meissonier's  engravers  were  Lavoi- 
gnat  and  Leveille,  and  Menzel's  Bentworth,  Vogel, 
and  Unzelmann. 

The  art  then  came  back  to  England,  and  that 
happened  in  this  way.  When  Menzel  had  issued  his 
Life  of  Frederick  the  Great  (1840),  the  English  en- 
graver Dalziel  showed  it  to  the  pre-Raphaelites,  and 
Rossetti  made  this  design,  which  Dalziel  engraved 
for  William  AUingham's  Music  Master  (1855). 
Every  one  of  these  artists  took  their  illustrations 
just  as  seriously  as  they  took  their  paintings,  as  this 
study  in  pen  and  ink  proves,  and  here  is  one  of 
the  illustrations  by  Rossetti  for  Moxon's  edition 
of  Tennyson,  the  great  illustrated  edition,  1857, 
(Page  2S)  ^^^  greatest  book  of  the  fifties  published 
in  England.  It  contained  Rossetti's  design  for  the 
"Palace  of  Art."  He,  however,  was  never  satisfied, 
and  no  artist  was  ever   completely   satisfied   with 

I  The  Lift  and  Times  of  Frederick  the  Second,  King  of  Prussia. 


PAGE  34  DANTE  GABRIEL  ROSSETTI:  THE  PALACE  OF  ART. 
FROM  MOXON'S  EDITION  OF  TENNYSON,  1857.  WOOD  EN- 
GRAVING  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


PAGE  37  W.  HOLM  AN  HUNT:  THE  LADY  OF  SHALOTT.  FROM 
MOXON'S  EDITION  OF  TENNYSON,  1857.  ENGRAVED  ON  WOOD 
BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


ILLUSTRATION  37 

wood  engravings  after  his  designs,  but  they  are  all 
we  have.  Rossetti  even  expressed  his  feelings  in 
verse: 

0  woodman,  spare  that  block 
Or  cut  not  anyhow. 

It  took  ten  days  by  clock, 

1  fain  would  save  it  now. 

Look  at  this  design  of  Holman  Hunt's.  Nothing 
that  he  ever  painted  approached  the  "Lady  of 
Shalott"  in  the  same  volume  (Page  36).  Every  line 
is  full  of  meaning,  full  of  grace  and  beauty.  Look 
at  the  loom  and  the  room  in  which  she  was  working. 
See  how  the  circle  of  the  loom  is  repeated  in  the 
windows  and  note  the  grace  of  the  figure.  It  is 
one  of  the  most  beautiful  examples  of  British  art. 
There  are  other  illustrations  in  the  volume  by 
Millais  which  are  fine,  but  most  of  the  rest  are 
of  little  merit. 

A  greater  man  than  any  of  these  illustrators,  a 
greater  technician,  was  Frederick  Sandys,  and  this  is 
an  illustration  to  one  of  George  Meredith's  poems 
"The  Old  Chartist,"  which  appeared  in  a  sixpenny 
magazine.  Once  a  Week,  in  1859  or  i860  (Page  39). 
Can  you  find  anything  of  that  sort  in  the  Ladies^  Home 
Journal?  Both  were  issued  for  the  people.  That 
was  the  sort  of  thing  our  fathers  were  brought  up 
to,  and  what  are  we  being  brought  down  to  by  the 
business  man  in  art  who  knows  what  the  people 
like  and  gives  it  to  them  so  long  as  he  can  fill  his 
pockets  to  overflowing  ? 

John  Millais  made  many  designs,  among  them  a 
series  of  illustrations  to  The  Parables.  Look  at  this 
one  of  "The  Sower"  (Page  40).  I  know  of  nothing 
better  in   the  art  of  illustration  or  engraving,  and 


A,0\'i'\ 


38  THE  GJIAPHIC  ARTS 

yet  it  is  just  a  design  made  for  a  page  illustration 
in  Good  Words^  another  popular  paper,  but  where 
can  you  find  a  finer  study  of  a  hillside  than 
that  ?  There  is  nothing  better  in  paint  by  Millais 
or  any  other  of  the  pre-Raphaelites.  He  did  not 
confine  himself  to  one  particular  sort  of  work;  it  was 
all  in  his  day's  work.  As  Whistler  said,  "A  man 
who  cannot  draw  everything  cannot  draw  any- 
thing." Please  remember  that  Millais  showed  in 
this  illustration  to  Trollope,  engraved  by  Joseph 
Swain,  that  the  crinoline  was  beautiful.  Everything 
in  the  world  but  billboards  is  beautiful  if  you  can 
see  it — but  they  are  damnable,  and  you  can't  help 
seeing  them. 

Fred  Walker  was  one  of  the  younger  men,  one 
of  the  great  artists  of  England  in  the  sixties,  and 
that  period  was  called  the  Golden  Age  of  English 
Illustration.  If  any  of  you  can  find  any  old  volumes 
of  the  first  ten  years  (1860-70)  of  Once  a  Week^  or 
Good  Words^  or  The  Cornhill^  you  will  have  some 
good  examples  of  the  graphic  art  of  that  time.  Fred 
Walker  made  most  of  the  illustrations  for  Thack- 
eray's books,  after  the  author  had  been  compelled 
to  admit  he  had  failed  as  an  illustrator. 

George  Du  Maurier  began  as  an  artist.  His 
early  drawings  were  full  of  detail  and  elaboration  and 
fine  as  anything  that  has  been  done,  yet  renderings  of 
the  maligned  Victorians  (Page  39) .  But  he. found  the 
people  did  not  come  up  to  his  level,  so  he  got  down 
to  theirs  and  degenerated  into  a  popular-mannered 
hack,  the  idol  of  the  altruistic  and  the  Hterary. 

Whistler  also  found  himself  among  the  illus- 
trators. This  print  (Page  41)  is  all  we  have,  but  it  is 
enough  to  show  his  technique  and  how  absolutely  he 
mastered  all  sorts  of  media.     This  is  a  design  for  a 


PAGE  37     FREDERICK  SANDYS :  THE  OLD  CHARTIST.     FROM  "ONCE 
A  WEEK."       ENGRAVED  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


PAGE  38       GEORGE    DU    MAURIER:   FROM    "PUNCH."       WOOD  EN- 
GRAVING BY  JOSEPH  SWAIN 


PAGE  37       SIR  JOHN  EVERETT  MILLAIS:  THE  SOWER.     FROM  "THE 
PARABLES."      ENGRAVED  ON  WOOD  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


PAGE  38  J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:  BOWL  AND  JAR.  FROM  A  CATA- 
LOGUE OF  BLUE  AND  WHITE  NANKIN  PORCELAIN.  DRAWN 
WITH  BRUSH.      AUTOTYPE 


PAGE  43      J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:  THE  MAJOR'S  DAUGHTER.     FROM 
"ONCE  A  WEEK,"      WOOD  ENGRAVING  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


ILLUSTRATION  43 

Catalogue  of  Blue  and  White  Nankin  Porcelain 
belonging  to  Sir  Henry  Thompson,  which  Whistler 
illustrated.  All  the  designs  were  drawn  in  sepia  or 
blue  and  reproduced  photographically.  I  don't  think 
you  can  find  anything  in  Japanese  art  more  perfect 
than  that  bowl  and  jar.  They  are  perfect.  There  is 
not  one  single  bit  of  work  which  is  not  perfect,  and 
it  is  one  of  the  great  examples  of  modern  illustra- 
tion. There  is  not  a  bit  of  shadow  or  tone;  it  is  all 
pure  drawing,  and  it  expresses  everything  about  the 
objects. 

The  other  design,  which  was  made  on  a  wood 
block  by  Whistler  (Page  42),  shows  exactly  the  way 
in  which  he  worked  with  a  pencil  and  pen  on  the 
block.  There  are  four  or  five  drawings,  not  engraved, 
by  him  now  in  the  Library  of  Congress  in  Washing- 
ton, soon  to  be  oh  exhibition. 

One  of  the  great  developments  in  illustration 
was  the  publication  of  the  London  Graphic,  which 
was  started  in  1869.  This  drawing  is  by  a  man 
named  W.  M.  Ridley,  who  is  scarcely  known,  biit 
if  all  his  drawings  could  only  be  published  again 
today  he  would  be  known  as  a  very  great  artist. 
To  the  early  numbers  of  The  Graphic,  Herkomer, 
Luke  Fildes,  Gregory,  and  many  other  well-known 
artists  contributed  drawings  which  made  their 
reputations. 

Another  artist,  Arthur  Boyd  Houghton,  who 
also  worked  for  The  Graphic,  came  over  to  America  in 
1869  and  made  a  series  of  studies  all  over  the  coun- 
try for  the  journal.  This  (Page  45)  is  in  the  Tombs  in 
New  York.  See  the  way  he  has  given  that  white- 
washed wall,  with  the  figures  against  it,  getting 
color  out  of  pure  white  paper.  He  was  justly 
regarded   as   one  of  the  greatest   artists  of  half  a 


44  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

century  ago.  He  also  illustrated  many  books.  An 
edition  of  the  Arabian  Nights  is  his  best-known 
work.  This  was  engraved  and  published  by  the 
Dalziels. 

Another  was  James  Mahoney,  who  illustrated 
Scrambles  among  the  Alps^  containing  his  finest  de- 
signs engraved  in  extraordinary  fashion  by  Edward 
Whymper,  the  author  of  the  book. 

Frederick  Shields  illustrated  Defoe's  Plague. 
How  faithfully  and  intelligently  he  has  studied 
Rembrandt  and  adapted  him  to  his  own  needs!  As 
fine  in  composition  and  light  and  shade  as  a  Rem- 
brandt, yet  only  an  illustration  in  a  sixpenny  book. 

Greater  probably  than  all,  because  he  was 
so  simple  and  direct,  was  Randolph  Caldecott. 
Nothing  could  be  more  simple  than  this  mad  dog 
(Page  46);  if  one  line,  one  touch,  wbre  left  out,  there 
would  be  no  dog.  Caldecott  did  a  great  deal  to  de- 
velop color  printing  in  England,  working  on  his  toy 
books,  which  were  engraved  on  wood  and  printed  in 
color  by  Edmund  Evans. 

One  thing  that  happened  at  this  time  was  the 
relief  of  the  artist  from  the  drudgery  of  drawing 
on  the  block.  Every  one  of  the  engravings  I  have 
shown  you  was  first  drawn  on  the  wood  block, 
and  every  one  of  them  cut  to  pieces,  and  the  artist 
had  no  redress  whatever  if  the  engraver  spoiled  the 
drawing  in  engraving.  But  someone,  somewhere, 
about  1875,  conceived  the  idea  of  photographing 
the  drawing  made  on  paper  on  to  the  wood  and 
engraving  it.  The  consequence  was  that  the  draw- 
ing was  preserved,  and  if  it  was  a  portrait  of  a  place 
the  artist  did  not  have  to  reverse  it  on  the  wood. 
If  the  engraver  went  wrong  he  could  not  blame  the 
artist,  as  he  did  before;   the  engraver  got  the  blame. 


PAGE  43  A.  B.  HOUGHTON:  THE  TOMBS.  FROM  "THE 
GRAPHIC,"  1869.  WOOD  ENGRAVING,  ENGRAVER  UN- 
KNOWN 


/ 


--\ 


1 


h^J 


PAGE  44  RANDOLPH  CALDECOTT:  THE  MAD  DOG.  FROM 
CALDECOTT'S  PICTURE  BOOKS.  ENGRAVED  ON  WOOD  BY 
EDMUND  EVANS 


PAGE  49  LORD  LEIGHTON:  SAMSON  CARRYING  OFF  THE 
GATES.  FROM  DALZIELS'  "BIBLE  GALLERY."  WOOD  EN- 
GRAVING  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


•  1  ^-^V-; 


PAGE  49      SIR  JOHN  TENNIEL :    FROM  "ALICE  IN  WONDERLAND. 
ENGRAVED  BY  JOSEPH  SWAIN 


■''-     .^^^*^< 


ENGLISH   VILLAGE.      FROM   "A   ROUND   OF  DAYS"   BY  G.  1.  PEN- 
WELL  AND   1.  W.  NORTH.       ENGRAVED  BY  DALZIEL  BROTHERS 


ILLUSTRATION  49 

where  it  often  belonged,  the  drawing  was  saved,  and 
the  artist  was  free.  The  drawing  was  photographed 
on  the  block  and  cut  by  the  engraver,  and  then 
printed. 

After  this  came  the  great  Tenniel.  Some  of  his 
works  are  among  the  treasures  of  the  South  Kensing- 
ton Museum.  But  he  will  live  by  Alice  in  Wonder- 
land (Page  47).  He  is  forgotten  as  a  caricaturist 
and  cartoonist,  and  his  technique,  though  easy  to 
engrave,  is  poor. 

Another  volume  that  was  issued  at  this  time  was 
Dalziels'  Bible  Gallery  (1875).  This  design  (Page  47) 
by  Lord  Leighton  is  one  of  the  finest  that  he  ever 
drew  in  his  life.  This  volume  was  not  issued  till  the 
drawings  made  by  the  illustrators  on  paper  could 
be  photographed  on  wood.  The  originals  are  in 
London  at  the  Victoria  and  Albert  Museum. 

Madox  Brown,  one  of  the  greatest  modern 
English  artists,  too  great  to  be  a  pre-Raphaelite, 
also  made  a  design  for  the  Bible.  So  did  Burne- 
Jones,  and  all  these  men  were  proud  to  work  as  book 
illustrators.  They  did  not  look  on  illustration  as 
an  easy  way  of  making  money,  but  as  a  great  art. 

Charles  Keene's  drawing  in  pen  and  ink  for  one  of 
his  Punch  pictures  (Page  51)  is  as  fine  as  anything  he 
ever  did,  as  fine  as  Hogarth.  He  was  able  to  work 
in  his  later  years  without  having  his  drawings  cut 
to  pieces.  I  have  put  two  illustrations  on  the 
same  slide  to  compare  his  work  with  Leech's,  then 
the  great  man,  now  ignored  by  artists.  Charles 
Keene  during  his  lifetime  was  almost  ignored.  Now 
he  has  come  into  his  own,  and  you  should  study  his 
drawings  in  Punch. 

Thirty  years  ago  triumphs  in  illustration  and 
engraving   were   produced   in    this    country    in  the 


50  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

magazines  of  the  years  between  1880  and  1900,  and 
the  greatest  of  wood  engravers  were  Americans. 
Timothy  Cole  is  regarded  as  a  master-engraver; 
so  were  Henry  Wolf  and  Jiingling,  Cole's  prints 
were  published  in  The  Century  Magazine.  If  you 
want  to  know  something  about  the  arts  of  illus- 
tration and  engraving,  look  over  The  Century  Maga- 
zine^  Harper  s  and  Scribners,  and  see  what  was 
done  then  in  the  graphic  arts  from  1880  to  1900. 
We  have  had  during  the  last  half-century  some  of 
the  greatest  designers,  some  of  the  greatest  engrav- 
ers, and  the  greatest  printers,  and  the  greatest  art 
editors  of  modern  times.  Abbey,  Cole,  De  Vinne, 
Drake — how  many  of  you  know  their  names  ? 
And  their  work  appeared  in  the  pages  of  those 
magazines.  The  magazines  are  still  being  pub- 
lished, but  I  do  not  think  you  will  find  in  any  num- 
ber today  any  wood  cut  or  wood  engraving  like 
this  by  Abbey  or  the  engraving  by  Cole  (Page  52). 

In  the  next  lecture  I  shall  show  you  how  we 
have  gone  forward  and  gone  backward,  but  at  that 
time  there  issued  a  series  of  masterpieces  from  those 
magazines,  and  it  is  your  duty  as  students  to  study 
them  and  to  study  the  illustrated  books  that  I  have 
shown  you.     Will  you  ?     I  doubt  it. 

Abbey  made  his  name  by  illustrating  Herrick^s 
Poems.  You  can  find  any  number  of  faults  in  this 
design,  yet  it  made  a  sensation  at  that  time.  But 
Abbey  went  on  and  on,  and  some  of  the  designs 
in  that  edition  of  Herrick  are  among  the  best  things 
that  he  did.  They  were  all  drawn  for  the  wood 
engraver,  and  probably  some  of  the  earliest  were 
drawn  on  the  wood  block. 

I  have  brought  you  up  to  the  present,  and  I  think 
I  have  proved  to  you  that  in  the  past,  in  the  graphic 


PAGE  49      CHARLES  KEENE:  THE  UNRECOGNIZED  VISITOR.      FROM 
"PUNCH,"  JULY,  1866 


PAGE  50  TIMOTHY  COLE:  HEAD  OF  FLORA,  FROM  BOTTl- 
CELLl'S  SPRING.  WOOD  ENGRAVING  FROM  COLE'S  "ITALIAN 
MASTERS" 


ILLUSTRATION  53 

arts,  there  was  great  work  done,  but  in  the  present, 
in  certain  places,  equally  great  work  was  done  till 
the  war;  but  little  that  is  good  is  now  being  done  in 
this  country  or  any  country,  and  it  is  up  to  you 
students  to  study  and  to  practice  and  demand  to  be 
taught  how  to  do  it,  and  then  to  go  to  work  and  do 
something  better  than  the  work  of  the  past.  Will 
you  ?  You  have  the  chance,  even  to  convert  the 
editors  and  engravers  and  printers  again  to  do  good 
work,  but  you  must  put  your  hearts  and  your  hands — 
your  properly  trained  and  skilled  hands — into  your 
work,  or  America  artistically  is  doomed.  The  future 
is  in  your  hands.  Will  you  carry  on  tradition  or  go 
down  in  the  mad  race  for  money — a  race  in  which 
the  runners  are  drawing  near  the  goal.''  Americans 
are  about  two  laps  behind  the  leaders,  and  we 
are  too  blind,  too  stupid,  too  lazy,  too  conceited, 
to  know  what  the  rest  of  the  world  knows. 


OLD  HAND  PRESS 


PAGE    59      JAPANESE     WOOD     CUTTER     AT     WORK. 
PRINT  IN   THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


FROM 


THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  ILLUSTRATION 
MODERN  METHODS  SECOND  LECTURE 
THURSDAY    APRIL    8    1920 

IN  the  first  lecture  I  tried  to  tell  you  something 
about  the  beginnings  of  illustration.  I  want  to 
speak  today  of  its  modern  developments.  But 
before  I  do,  I  would  like  to  say  that,  if  there  is 
any  statement  I  make  that  you  do  not  understand, 
I  wish  you  would  ask  me  about  it,  or  write  me,  and 
I  will  try  to  make  my  meaning  clear.  But  no 
matter  how  much  I  talk,  or  what  I  say,  unless  you 
are  willing  to  do  your  part  and  look  things  up,  and 
then  work  with  the  facts  you  have  acquired — well, 
I  don't  think  you  will  learn  very  much,  or  do  any- 
thing of  much  importance,  for  without  the  hardest 


56  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

work  you  will  never  do  anything  of  the  least  impor- 
tance in  art  at  all/ 

There  is  another  sort  of  work,  another  phase  of 
art,  which  has  been  made  great  and  good  use  of 
during  the  last  years  by  illustrators,  and  that  is  the 
work  of  the  Japanese — the  Japanese  color  print. 
It  is  the  custom  today  in  this  country,  and  in 
European  countries,  to  make  much  of  the  Japanese 
color  print.  The  Japanese  color  print  was  never 
appreciated  in  Japan  by  any  but  the  people,  any 
more  than  the  illustrations  in  the  books  of  yesterday 
were  appreciated  by  any  of  the  artists  of  this  country, 
and  it  is  only  because  a  few  European  artists  saw  the 
beauty  of  the  woi»ks  of  Hiroshige,  Hokusai,  Utamaro, 
and  other  great  artists,  that  the  Japanese  them- 
selves began  to  find  they  were  beautiful.  Here  the 
people  do  not  yet  appreciate  what  we  have  done 
in  illustration.  The  Japanese  illustrators  were  very 
little  better  appreciated  than  the  pavement  artists 
who  used  to  decorate  our  streets  before  we  got  bill- 
stickers  to  do  our  decoration,  but  there  was  in  Japa- 
nese work  wonderful  charm  and  wonderful  technique. 
So  there  was  in  American  illustration.  Prints  by 
Hokusai,  in  black  and  white,  are  perfect  as  models  of 
design  for  printing.  It  was  in  prints  like  these  that 
Whistler  found  his  Nocturnes.  He  said  when  he  saw 
Hiroshige's  Falling  Rocket  (Page  57),  it  gave  him 
the  idea  for  the  Nocturnes,  and  he,  inspired  by  that 
print,  made  his  paintings  and  his  drawings  after  the 
Japanese  fashion,  only  carrying  out  the  traditions  of 
the  East  in  the  West. 

But  the  Eastern  print  has  been  of  great  value 
to  the  Western  illustrator  in  many  other  ways,  as 

'  Not  a  single  student  ever  asked  me  a  question  or  wrote  me  a  line.  This  is 
universal  in  America  vvfliere  students  know  everything  until  they  try  to  do  something, 
when  they  find  they  do  not  know  anything,  and  then  whine. 


PAGE    56       HlROSHlCiE:     THE    FALLING    ROCKET.       THE   IN- 
SPIRATION    OF    WHISTLER'S    NOCTURNES.       COLOR   PRINT 


JAPANESE  PRINTER  AT  WORK.      FROM    ILLUSTRATION  IN 
BOOK   IN   THE   ART  INSTITUTE    OF   CHICAGO 


ILLUSTRATION  59 

the  color  print  in  line,  in  form,  and  above  all,  in 
method,  is  the  simplest  and  most  direct  way  of 
making  a  printing  surface  that  we  know,  and  a  great 
deal  that  we  now  know  and  a  great  many  of  the 
improvements  in  engraving  and  printing  that  have 
been  made  are  due  to  the  Japanese. 

Take  this  study  of  a  bird  (Page  6i).  Nothing 
could  be  more  simple  and  more  direct.  And  yet  it 
probably  was  used  in  the  most  commonplace  of 
books,  or  as  a  single  print,  but  it  has  been  an  inspi- 
ration to  many  Europeans.  And  here  is  an  example 
of  it  in  the  work  of  an  Englishman,  Edgar  Wilson 
(Page  62),  who,  following  the  Japanese  methods 
and  using  the  pen  at  the  same  time,  instead  of 
drawing  with  the  brush  on  the  wood  block  in  which 
the  design  was  afterward  cut  and  printed,  carried  on 
the  tradition  of  Japanese  art  in  our  way  and  by  our 
technique.  Bracquemond,  Felix  Regamy,  and  many 
other  European  decorators  owe  an  endless  debt  to 
Japan. 

They  are  by  no  means  alone;  here  is  another 
man  who  used  the  Japanese  formula.  You  can 
find  in  some  of  the  sketch  books  of  Hokusai,  and 
other  Japanese  masters,  drawings  of  birds  like  this. 
Yet  this  design  was  reproduced  on  the  title-page  of 
a  French  edition  of  Poe's  Raven.  It  is  by  Manet 
(Page  6I)),  a  proof  that  as  soon  as  Europeans  saw 
Japanese  prints,  they  took  advantage  of  Japanese 
methods.  The  Japanese  artists  have  also  shown 
the  world  in  their  prints  the  way  in  which  the  work 
was  done.  Here  is  a  wood  cutter  at  work  holding 
his  knife  vertically  in  his  hands,  cutting  the  design 
on  the  block  (Page  ^c^).  I  do  not  know  the  date 
of  this  print  or  the  name  of  the  artist,  but  this 
is    the    traditional   system,   and  it   is    because    the 


60  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Japanese  artists  follow  tradition  that  their  work  is 
good,  and  we  have  not  in  any  way  been  able  to 
improve  on  it. 

Anyone  who  wants  to  make  a  color  print,  instead 
of  commencing  by  making  a  very  bad  oil  painting,  or 
a  worthless  water  color,  should  commence  by  mak- 
ing a  drawing  in  black  and  white;  that  is  the  basis 
of  the  whole  system — that  is  the  way  the  Japanese 
commence.  When  they  have  made  their  design 
on  paper  in  black  and  white,  they  paste  it  down  on 
a  wood  block,  and  the  engraver  cuts  through  the 
paper  into  the  block,  cutting  the  design  all  to 
pieces,  as  that  man  is  doing  with  his  knife.  When 
that  was  done  the  next  thing  was  to  put  on  the  color, 
and  instead  of  making,  as  the  European  artist  usually 
does,  a  very  bad  oil  painting  or  a  worthless  water 
color  and  trying  to  copy  that  by  lithography  or 
color  process,  they  cut  as  many  blocks  as  colors, 
mix  the  colors  themselves  and  put  them  on,  one 
after  the  other,  one  color  from  one  block.  It  is 
utterly  impossible  to  get  color  by  any  other  method. 
Nearly  all  our  books  and  magazines  today  are 
illustrated  by  what  is  known  as  "  the  three-color 
process."  You  can  see  the  result  on  the  cover  of 
every  magazine,  almost,  that  comes  out,  and  the 
only  difference  between  them  is  that  sometimes 
one  is  rather  worse  than  the  others.  They  are 
nearly  all  devoid  of  every  merit,  and  they  are  all 
the  most  popular  in  the  American  world.  They 
are  mechanical  photographic  travesties  of  artless, 
worthless  paintings  mostly. 

The  Japanese  have  an  entirely  different  method, 
and  that  now  is  beginning  to  be  carried  out  here. 
But  you  students  must  be  properly  trained  tech- 
nically before  you  can  do  the  work  decently.     There 


PAGE    59       BIRD.       JAPANESE     COLOR    PRINT    IN    THE 
ART   INSTITUTE   OF   CHICAGO 


PAGE  59      EDGAR  WILSON:  FISH.       PEN  AND  INK  DRAWING  DONE 
WITH  JAPANESE  FEELING 


PAGE    59      E.    MANET:      ILLUSTRATION     FOR     POE'S     "RAVEN. 
DRAWN    IN    JAPANESE    FASHION    WITH    BRUSH   AND    INK 


PAGE   65       WALTER    CRANE:    COLOR    PRINT    FOR  "BEAUTY 
AND  THE  BEAST."        ENGRAVED  AND  PRINTED  BY  EDMUND 

EVANS 


/#- 


,/'         I 


Pm 

i 

4i  \M 

1 

PAGE    65       F.  MORLEY    FLETCHER:    MEADOWSWEET.      KEY  BLOCK 
AND  FINISHED  PRINT 


ILLUSTRATION  65 

are  certain  men  at  work,  and  others  have  been 
doing  good  color  work  for  years.  Here  is  one  of 
the  earliest  examples,  a  design  by  Walter  Crane, 
though  this  was  not  done  in  the  Japanese  way. 
Crane  made  the  drawing  in  black  and  white,  then 
it  was  engraved  on  the  wood  block,  and  he  added  the 
colors  he  wanted.  The  wood  blocks  were  engraved 
by  an  English  engraver,  Edmund  Evans  (Page  64), 
and  as  many  blocks  were  made  as  colors  were 
wanted,  and  they  were  applied  just  as  the  Japanese 
did,  only  with  this  difference,  that  they  were  printed 
on  a  steam  press  and  in  this  way  Crane's  and  Calde- 
cott's  toy  books  were  made.  We  have  advanced 
to  the  extent  of  using  the  steam  press,  instead  of 
rubbing  the  print  off  the  inked  block,  or  using  the 
wooden  press.  But  that  is  the  only  advance  we 
have  made.  The  best  color  work  is  not  even  now 
done  on  a  steam  press,  but  by  hand  printing. 

Morley  Fletcher  has  studied  most  carefully  the 
work  of  the  oriental  artists  and  craftsmen,  and  has 
succeeded  in  doing  a  series  of  blocks  which  in  their 
way  equal  those  of  the  Japanese.  Yet  his  attitude 
is  the  European  attitude;  it  is  putting  the  feeling 
of  the  country  around  him,  England,  into  his  blocks. 
He  has  not  in  any  way  tried  to  imitate  Japanese 
subjects  or  to  make  copies  of  them,  but  he  has 
carried  out  the  feeling  of  the  English  country,  and 
of  other  European  countries,  in  his  color  prints  made 
as  the  Japanese  make  their  prints.  He  cut  the  key 
block  from  which  he  made  the  print  in  black  and 
white  (Page  64).  The  other  blocks,  made  afterward, 
carried  the  different  colors.  You  can  see  how  every 
line  has  been  carefully  drawn,  and  how  carefully 
the  undrawn  spaces  are  cut  out,  leaving  the  design 
in  relief.     After  that  block  was  made  there  were  as 


66  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

many  others  cut  as  there  were  colors,  and  one  was 
printed  after  the  other,  not  on  top  of  each  other, 
but  side  by  side,  as  a  mosaic  is  made.  And  it  is  in 
this  way  alone  that  good  color  work  can  be  done. 
Yet  such  printing  can  be  done  on  a  steam  press, 
and  can  be  done  very  rapidly,  though  the  best  work 
is,  and  always  will  be,  done  by  hand. 

Here  in  Chicago  you  had  a  very  interesting 
woman,  Helen  Hyde,  who  died  recently,  and  whose 
work  is  going  to  be  shown,  I  believe,  shortly  in  the 
Museum.  Her  work  technically  was  brilliant,  but  a 
great  many  of  her  subjects  were  frankly  imitative 
of  the  Japanese  in  subject  as  well  as  technique. 
There  is  no  earthly  reason  why  those  of  you  who 
care  for  drawing  and  for  color  should  not  carry 
out  this  scheme  of  color  printing.  But,  as  I  will 
show  you  in  the  talk  on  Lithography,  there  are 
simpler  ways  of  doing  color  work,  and  even  men 
like  Morley  Fletcher  and  other  color  printers  are 
giving  up  using  wood  blocks,  and  beginning  the  use 
of  stone  and  metal  plates  instead,  because  the 
work  can  be  done  in  a  simpler  manner  than  by 
the  slow  and  elaborate  cutting  of  each  block.  Yet 
the  grain  of  the  wood  gives  a  most  interesting 
quality,  and  so  does  hand  printing. 

Emil  Orlik  (Page  67)  has  carried  out  the  same 
scheme  of  color  printing.  He  holds  the  same  posi- 
tion on  the  continent  of  Europe,  in  Germany  and 
Austria — or  did  before  the  war — that  Morley  Fletcher 
has  in  England.  Scarcely  any  of  the  work  of  these 
men  is  known  well  over  here,  but  it  deserves  to  be 
well  known.  You  can  find  some  examples  of  it  in 
the  Ryerson  Library,  mostly  in  reproductions  in  the 
Studio.  And  if  you  care  anything  for  color  printing, 
it  is  your  duty  to  study  the  books  which  contain  it. 


PAGE  66       EMIL  ORLIK:   THE  SEAMSTRESS.      COLOR  BLOCK  PRINT 
IN  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


PAGE  71      GUSTAVE  BAUMANN  :  THE  LANDMARK.     COLOR  BLOCK 
PRINT  IN  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


PAGE    71         ARTHUR    RACKHAM :     CINDERELLA.        SILHOUETTES 
AND  WASH  REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS,  J.  B.  UPPINCOTT  CO. 


QuatorjatnV 
by 

Henley. 


Londonl^es 

BirWrniamNicbokoa. 


PAGE  72       WILLIAM  NICHOLSON:  LONDON  TYPES.      WOOD 
BLOCK  REPRODUCED  AND  PRINTED  BY  LITHOGRAPHY 


ILLUSTRATION  71 

You  should  also  read  Morley  Fletcher's  treatise  on 
color  printing. 

Mr.  Baumann,  who  has  been  living  until  recently 
in  Chicago,  also  makes  color  prints  (Page  68).  He 
has  found  that  the  landscape  of  America  is  just  as 
well  adapted  to  the  color  print  as  that  of  Europe, 
and  the  proof  of  the  fact  that  a  man  is  an  artist  is 
the  fact  that  he  can  find  beauty  and  find  subjects 
around  him,  and  then  make  something  out  of  what 
he  finds.  Mr.  Ruzicka  has  done  so  in  New  York. 
There  is  no  necessity  for  harking  back  to  the  past 
ages.  And  I  can  assure  you,  although  I  have  not 
had  the  experience,  but  I  know  from  what  I  have 
seen,  that  it  is  a  great  deal  easier  to  invent  a 
Heavenly  Host  than  it  is  to  make  a  good  print  out 
of  a  Kansas  farm. 

Now,  showing  how  this  work  can  be  carried  out — 
and  I  said  it  could  be  done  by  means  of  the  steam 
press  and  mechanical  appliances — a  good  example  is 
in  the  work  of  Arthur  Rackham  (Page  69).  He  has 
adapted  the  methods  of  the  Japanese  to  photo- 
engraving and  mechanical  engraving.  His  designs 
are  made  with  a  pen,  in  black  and  white.  The  colors 
are  selected  by  Rackham  and  given  to  the  photo- 
engravers,  who  put  them  on  just  where  he  wants 
them.  But  Rackham  is  a  trained  craftsman  and 
knows  what  colors  to  use  and  how  to  use  them.  As  I 
said  in  the  last  talk,  you  have  to  stand  over  the 
printers,  you  have  to  make  them  work  with  you 
and  for  you.  And  if  you  don't,  and  you  get  into  a 
mess,  it  is  because  you  are  not  trained.  But  you 
are  going  to  be  blamed  if  you  fail,  if  you  don't 
know  your  craft.  You  have  to  be  trained  to  do 
this  work  as  Rackham  is  trained.  I  have  been  with 
him  in  England  when  he  has  gone  into  the  printing 


72  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

shop,  and  has  taken  off  his  coat  and  rolled  up  his 
sleeves  and  shown  the  printers  what  he  wants  and 
how  he  wants  it  done,  and  if  he  didn't  know  himself 
and  couldn't  have  shown  them,  he  would  have  been 
kicked  out  of  that  place  pretty  quickly.  He  would 
not  even  be  an  illustrator. 

Jules  Guerin  carried  out  extremely  well  so  long 
as  he  condescended  to  illustrate  by  the  Japanese 
method  of  flat  color,  and  yet  gave  to  his  subjects  a 
remarkable  sense  of  realism.  His  drawings  for  the 
city-planning  scheme  of  Chicago  and  studies  of  other 
cities  and  architecture  are  most  interesting.  In 
figure  work,  too,  Jessie  Willcox  Smith  and  Elizabeth 
Shippen  Green  started  well — with  a  Bryn  Mawr 
catalogue  or  calendar — but  in  their  later  work  they 
have  become  more  realistic — though  I  do  not  think 
they  are  so  real. 

Another  artist  who  has  done  the  same  sort  of 
work  in  an  equally  interesting  fashion  is  William 
Nicholson  (Page  70).  He  designed  the  illustrations 
and  lettered  the  title-page  and  cover  oi London  Types. 
These  designs  were  first  printed  from  wood  blocks 
which  he  cut,  but  as  the  book  was  printed  in  a  large 
edition  it  was  impossible  for  him  to  do  the  printing 
himself,  so  he  had  copies  made  and  printed  by  lithog- 
raphy instead  of  from  the  original  wood  blocks.  But 
the  design  shows  how  well  Nicholson  understands 
the  requirements  and  needs  of  color  printing.  He 
understands  that  as  well  as  anybody  now  living. 
His  posters  and  those  of  his  fellow-workman  James 
Pryde — they  called  themselves  the  Beggerstaff 
Brothers — are  equally  interesting. 

In  Europe  the  art  of  wood  cutting  has  been  car- 
ried farther  than  anywhere  else  in  recent  years  by 
A.  Lepere   (Page  73).     This  is   one   of  his  original 


PAGE  72      AUGUSTE  LEPERE:  NOTRE  DAME;  LE  SOIR.      ORIGINAL 
WOOD  BLOCK.    BY  PERMISSION  OF  F.  KEPPEL  &.  CO. 


PAGE  77      F.  VALLOTON:  THE  BURIAL.      ORIGINAL  WOOD  BLOCK. 
FROM  "PEN  DRAWING  AND  PEN  DRAUGHTSMEN" 


PAGE    78       ROCKWELL    KENT: 
OF    CHICAGO 


CAIN.      IN   THE   ART    INSTITUTE 


\        NX 


PAGE  79      MARIANO  FORTUNY:  STUDY.      FROM  DARILLER'S  "LIFE 
OF  FORTUNY."      PEN  DRAWING  REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS 


ILLUSTRATION  77 

blocks.  I  think  it  probable  that  he  made  this  study 
of  Notre  Dame  from  nature  on  the  wood  block, 
and  then  engraved  it.  In  it  you  have  the  perfection 
of  original  wood  engraving,  the  perfection  in  Euro- 
pean engraving,  and  of  what  the  Japanese  have  been 
doing  in  their  way  for  hundreds  of  years.  There  are 
numbers  of  other  men  who  have  been  working;  one 
is  F.  Valloton  (Page  74),  and  he  has  simplified  things 
more.  I  don't  think  it  would  be  possible  to  get 
simpler,  fewer  lines  and  masses  than  he.  He  has  cut 
a  number  of  wood  blocks,  and  every  one  is  well 
worth  study.  I  want  to  say,  however,  that  we  have 
in  this  country  now  got  beyond  all  this  thing,  far 
beyond  traditional  art — far  beyond  all  art.  We 
have  become  artless  but  crafty. 

Here  are  a  couple  of  illustrations  taken  from  a 
paper  which  used  to  be  a  credit  to  the  city  of 
Chicago.  Now  it  is  a  discredit  to  the  city  of  New 
York.  The  print  this  side  of  the  slide  is,  as  you 
see,  from  a  Japanese  block;  the  print  on  the  other 
side  is  an  American  design.  If  you  prefer  that — 
each  one  of  them  is  equally  simple — to  the  draw- 
ing of  this  figure,  well,  all  I  can  say  is,  you  can 
do  so.  And  that  sort  of  work  is  growing  in  this 
country,  and  is  used  at  the  present  day,  and  being 
more  and  more  used.  It  is  only  an  excuse  for 
incompetence,  laziness,  and  inability,  to  avoid  the 
trouble,  skill,  and  time  necessary  to  do  anything 
decently — provided  you  can  do  it  decently.  It 
may  be  the  fashion  of  the  moment,  but  it  is  only 
of  the  moment,  and  will  not,  like  this  Japanese 
print,  live  forever,  as  it  has  lived  for  a  couple  of 
hundred  years.  The  other  may  make  a  little 
splutter  for  a  moment,  but  it  will  not  go  on  living 
and  growing  and  be  more  and  more  appreciated  for 


78  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

all  time.  It  is  so  easy  to  do  a  drawing  of  this  sort. 
The  perpetrator  will  tell  you  he  did  it  the  way  he 
saw  it — I  mean  the  American  print.  That  is  a 
way  of  getting  out  of  all  difficulties,  but  it  is  not 
a  way  to  become  an  artist.  And  no  man  who  takes 
up  the  slovenly,  slipshod,  get-there-any-way-you- 
can  method,  is  ever  going  to  get  anywhere  at  all. 
You  can  take  my  word  for  it  or  not,  but  I  know  I 
am  telling  you  the  truth,  and  as  one  eminent  artist 
said  on  looking  at  drawings  like  this,  or  rather,  look- 
ing at  the  same  sort  of  paintings:  "You  can  tell 
exactly  what  great  artists  like  Velasquez  or  Franz 
Hals  or  Rembrandt  meant  when  they  painted  a 
subject,  but  you  cannot  tell  how  they  painted  it. 
If  you  look  at  this  modern  work  you  can  tell  how  it 
was  done,  but  I  will  be  hanged  if  you  can  tell  what 
the  duffer  meant  by  doing  it." 

Rockwell  Kent  (Page  75)  has  followed  Blake  tech- 
nically in  a  way,  yet  for  himself,  though  drawing  on 
paper,  and  his  drawings  are  reproduced  mechanically 
and  not  as  Blake's  were  by  metal  or  wood  engrav- 
ing, and  Kent  is  trying,  really  seriously  I  hope,  to 
carry  on  the  tradition  of  Blake  in  those  drawings 
which  I  showed  you  the  other  day.  Kent  has 
found  Blake-like  subjects  in  Alaska,  but  I  wish  he 
could  find  motives — and  there  are  subjects  quite  as 
interesting  and  as  good,  and  as  romantic  in  the 
streets  of  New  York,  just  as  Blake  got  his  inspira- 
tion in  his  little  garden  near  the  Temple  in  Lon- 
don; and  I  think  if  Kent  found  them  somewhere 
on  the  East  Side,  it  would  be  more  to  his  credit, 
though  his  work  is  very  interesting  and  reproduces 
very  well. 

•  But  to  turn  from  original  wood  cutting  and  wood 
engraving  to  another  phase  of  illustration,  there  is  a 


ILLUSTRATION  79 

new  phase,  as  I  told  you  last  week,  since  the  applica- 
tion of  photography  to  wood  engraving,  enabling 
the  artist  to  make  his  drawing  on  paper,  have  it 
photographed  on  to  the  block,  and  then  engraved. 
When  this  was  done  a  great  advance  in  the  arts  was 
made. 

But  about  1880  a  still  greater  advance  was  made. 
It  was  discovered  that  if  a  drawing  were  photo- 
graphed on  to  a  zinc  or  other  metal  plate,  the  un- 
drawn parts  washed  away,  and  the  drawing  covered 
by  an  acid-resisting  varnish  in  the  form  of  ink, 
it  could  then  be  etched  mechanically  instead  of 
engraved  by  hand.  The  photograph  was  covered 
by  this  acid-resisting  ink,  then  slightly  bitten  with 
nitric  acid,  then  the  plate  was  heated  and  the 
varnish  melted  and  ran  down  the  sides  of  the  lines, 
and  not  only  protected  their  surface  but  their  sides, 
and  in  that  way  a  mechanically  etched  block  was 
made,  the  design  in  relief,  which  can  be  printed 
with  type,  exactly  like  a  wood  cut  or  a  wood  engrav- 
ing in  relief — exactly  as  Blake  had  done,  yet  a  perfect 
facsimile  of  the  original  drawing,  a  reproduction  of 
the  drawing  as  a  printing  surface.  It  is  a  very 
curious  thing  that,  although  this  is  one  of  the  very 
first  mechanical  engravings  done  in  France  after 
Fortuny  (Page  76),  it  is  as  perfect  in  its  technical 
execution  as  anything  that  has  been  done  in  the 
same  way  to  this  day. 

The  wood  cuts  and  the  metal  engravings  by 
Diirer  have  never  been  surpassed,  nor  have  the 
wood  engravings  by  Timothy  Cole,  nor  the  mechani- 
cal engravings  done  by  a  Frenchman  named 
Gillot,  who  with  an  artist  named  Chefdeville  per- 
fected mechanical  engraving.  There  is  no  such 
wonderful  work  being  done  today  as  was  done  some 


80  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

forty  years  ago  in  France  and  here.  Always  in  the 
history  of  the  world,  when  a  new  method  of  work 
is  discovered,  brilliant  men  capable  of  employing  it 
have  appeared.  Martin  Rico  (Page  8i),  a  landscape 
and  townscape  artist,  found  himself  in  pen  drawing. 
He  used  the  pen  for  the  rendering  of  architecture 
and  one  of  the  most  interesting  things  about  his 
work  i^  the  directness  and  simplicity  with  which 
Rico  got  his  effect,  and  the  economy  and  beauty  of 
his  lines.  There  is  not  a  single  line  wasted,  and 
yet  he  got  all  the  shimmer  and  the  glitter  of  the 
summer  sun  in  Venice.  He  suggests,  too,  the  forms 
of  the  architecture,  rather  than  draws  them — sug- 
gests them  by  shadows  which  give  the  form.  He 
is  one  of  the  masters  of  drawing  for  reproduction, 
for  it  is  the  reproduction  of  the  drawing  on  the 
printed  page  which  is  the  illustration. 

Shortly  afterward  another  Spaniard  appeared — 
Daniel  Vierge  (Page  82).  Both  Fortuny  and  Rico 
were  Spaniards,  and  the  best  work  was  done  in  illus- 
tration for  mechanical  engraving  in  the  beginning  by 
Spaniards.  Vierge  carried  this  system  of  drawing 
for  mechanical  engraving  farther  than  anyone  else, 
and  carried  it  out  more  perfectly.  Look  at  the 
way  each  one  of  his  lines  tells  just  as  effectively  as 
in  the  old  wood  cuts.  Vierge's  fame  rests  on  the 
pages  of  Pablo  de  Segovia^  the  most  perfect  book 
and  one  of  the  first  books  illustrated  by  pen  drawings 
reproduced  by  mechanical  process  engraving,  and 
still  one  of  the  best.  Vierge  treated  all  sorts  of 
subjects  in  this  volume — figure,  landscape,  still 
life,  decoration — and  he  tried  all  sorts  of  experi- 
ments in  technique,  always  remembering  and 
knowing  that  an  illustrator  must  be  a  brilliant 
technical  craftsman,  as  all  great  artists  have  been. 


A. 


jejj,0^i^^^sx.^ 


PAGE    80       MARTIN    RICO:     A    VENETIAN    CANAL.       FROM    "PEN 
DRAWING  AND  PEN  DRAUGHTSMEN" 


PAGE    80      DANIEL    VIERGE:     THE    UNIVERSITY.      PEN    DRAWING 
REPRODUCED   BY   PROCESS.     FROM   "PABLO   DE   SEGOVIA" 


PAGE   85      ROBERT  BLUM:    JOE  JEFFERSON.      PEN    DRAWING   RE- 
PRODUCED  BY  PROCESS.      COLLECTION  OF  THE  AUTHOR 


PAGE  85  A.  BRENNAN:  STAIRWAY,  CHANTILLY.  PEN 
DRAWING  REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS.  COLLECTION  OF 
THE    AUTHOR 


ILLUSTRATION  85 

A  duffer  may  do  stupid,  clumsy  work  because  he 
"sees  that  way";    an  artist  never  does. 

How  wonderfully  Vierge  could  draw  architecture, 
and  yet  with  simplicity  and  directness,  so  that  he  kept 
the  sunlight  in  his  drawings.  They  were  so  handled 
that  they  reproduced  perfectly,  and  they  could 
not  be  better  printed  today,  mostly  not  so  well. 
Yet  that  book  appeared  in  a  very  small  edition  about 
1880.  It  is  now  regarded  as  a  masterpiece,  and 
the  greatest  example  of  pen  drawing  and  reproduc- 
tion that  exists,  a  mine  of  information  for  you 
students. 

The  success  of  Vierge's  books  and  the  reproduc- 
tions after  Fortuny  became  known  in  this  country, 
and  in  the  early  8o's  Robert  Blum  (Page  83),  Alfred 
Brennan  (Page  84),  and  Fernand  Lungren  began  to 
follow  this  Spanish  method  of  drawing.  This  study 
of  Joe  Jefferson  by  Robert  Blum  was  published  in 
The  Century.  In  it  you  have  an  extraordinary 
quality  of  pen  line  which  you  very  rarely  see,  you 
never  see,  in  our  magazines  today.  There  is  no  man 
in  the  world  drawing  as  Blum  did,  nor  are  there  any 
such  engravers  and  printers  now,  because  there  are 
few  intelligent  art  editors,  and  fewer  intelligent 
art  lovers,  otherwise  we  would  not  have  to  see  the 
rubbish  we  do  see.  You  will  find  those  wonderful 
illustrations,  many  of  them  portraits  like  this,  and 
prints  of  all  sorts,  in  old  numbers  of  The  Century 
and  Scribners  and  Harper  s.  And  just  as  I  told 
you  about  the  old  numbers  of  Once  a  Week  and 
Good  Words,  I  want  to  drum  into  your  heads  that 
there  is  a  mine  of  material  worth  study  in  every 
volume  of  The  Century  between  about  1880  and 
1900,  and  you  ought  to  study  these  illustrations 
and  try  to  learn  from  them. 


86  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

There  is,  however,  one  thing  you  must  remember, 
that  the  drawings  you  see  in  these  magazines  are 
all  reduced.  They  were  all  reduced,  or  nearly  all 
of  them,  by  photography,  and  that  gives  them  a 
look  of  refinement  and  delicacy  which  did  not  alto- 
gether exist  in  the  originals.  But  Blum  thought 
about  the  final  print  on  the  page  as  much  as  the 
drawing  he  was  making,  and  how  he  was  to  get  his 
results,  and  this  only  comes  by  endless  practice 
and  endless  observation  of  other  men's  drawn  and 
printed  work.  In  that  he  was  only  carrying  on 
tradition,  and  if  you  don't  want  to  carry  on  tradition, 
if  you  don't  try  to  do  better  work  than  everyone 
who  has  gone  before  you,  well,  as  Whistler  was  wont 
to  say,  if  tradition  had  not  been  carried  on,  "even 
the  early  Britons  wouldn't  have  known  how  to  paint 
themselves  blue." 

Blum  has  treated  architecture  just  as  Rico  did, 
and  this  design  is  taken  from  a  catalogue  of  a 
hotel  in  Florida,  and  is  as  fine  as  anything  he  ever  did, 
a  proof  that  advertisements  may  be  artistic — if  kept 
from  the  advertising  man.  And  yet  this  is  nothing 
but  an  advertisement,  an  advertisement  done  by  an 
artist  who  considered  that  illustrating  and  advertis- 
ing were  as  serious  as  any  other  form  of  art. 

And  now  I  come  to  an  entirely  different  sort  of 
work,  yet  done  by,  I  think  you  will  admit,  probably 
the  greatest  illustrator  that  we  have  had,  E.  A. 
Abbey.  In  this  design  there  is  no  attempt  at 
getting  brilliancy  of  sunlight,  or  any  such  effects, 
but  an  attempt  to  reconstruct,  as  in  this  drawing  for 
She  Stoops  to  Conquer,  the  life  of  England  in  the 
past.  Abbey  considered  illustration  just  as  seriously 
as  his  painting  or  his  decoration.  And  even  if  his 
decorations  and  his  paintings  were  wiped  out,  he 


ILLUSTRATION  87 

would  be  remembered  forever  by  the  charming 
illustrations  that  he  made  for  Harper  s  Magazine^ 
and  the  books  in  which  they  afterward  appeared. 

Here  is  another  one  from  Goldsmith,  showing 
better,  I  think,  than  the  last  the  actual  pen  work  and 
the  handling.  And  although  it  looks  freely  done,  it 
is  carefully  thought  out  and  carefully  carried  out. 
It  was  commenced  with  a  lead  pencil,  and  then  gone 
over  with  ink — most  of  these  men  made  a  pencil 
drawing  first  and  then  went  over  that  with  a  pen. 
Abbey  said  to  me  once — and  I  believe  it  is  true  of 
all  great  artists — that  he  never  touched  pencil  to 
paper  until  he  saw  the  whole  design  completed 
before  him  on  the  blank  sheet  of  paper.  He  got  the 
whole  thing  in  his  head,  and  had  it  there  before  he 
commenced  to  work.  But  I  can  tell  you,  he  didn't  do 
it  out  of  his  head,  for  that  man  never  drew  anything 
without  a  model.  He  hunted  the  whole  of  England 
over  for  those  chairs  and  tables  in  the  drawing.  If 
there  was  a  bit  of  detail  or  anything  of  that  sort  he 
wanted,  even  though  it  should  be  in  the  remotest 
part  of  Europe,  he  never  hesitated  to  go  and  get  it, 
or  get  somebody  to  get  it  for  him,  and  put  it  in  as  a 
tiny  detail  in  one  of  his  illustrations  to  make  that 
drawing  right.  But  as  he  said,  illustration  is  just  as 
serious  as  any  other  form  of  art,  only  now  it  is  not 
so  regarded.  Working  with  Abbey  was  an  English- 
man, Alfred  Parsons  (Page  89),  who  designed  nearly 
all  the  frontispieces  and  head-  and  tail-pieces,  and 
drew  the  landscapes,  in  Abbey's  books.  Here  is  the 
title-page  from  one  of  these  books  which  shows  how 
brilliantly  Parsons  could  render  decoration.  But 
he  did  not  confine  himself  to  that,  for  here  is  one  of 
his  drawings  from  nature,  a  little  tail-piece,  carried 
out  with  the  utmost  perfection,  and  carried  out  in 


88  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

a  way  that  has  never  been  surpassed.  Although 
Parsons  was  known  all  over  the  world  years  before 
he  began  to  paint,  and  though  it  was  not  until  he 
did  paint  that  he  became  a  member  of  the  Royal 
Academy  and  other  societies,  yet  he,  too,  like 
Abbey,  will  live  by  his  black-and-white  illustrations. 
William  Morris,  a  little  later,  determined  to 
resurrect  the  work  of  the  past.  His  idea,  and  that 
of  the  pre-Raphaelites,  was  that  everything  after 
the  time  of  Raphael  was  worthless,  and  he  went 
back  to  the  earliest  designing  and  the  earliest 
printing.  And  he  endeavored,  and  succeeded  from 
his  point  of  view,  in  making  decorated  books  which 
have  never  been  surpassed  in  modern  times  and 
probably  never  will  be  equaled  again.  He  also 
designed  and  had  his  type  cut  and  cast,  made 
initials  and  borders,  and  almost  ruined  the  whole 
with  his  awful  stops  which  disfigure  the  pages.  He 
set  the  whole  up,  and  printed  his  books  on  hand 
presses,  basing  his  work  on  that  of  the  early  Venetian 
printers  of  the  fifteenth  century,  printing  a  notable 
series  of  volumes  by  the  methods  of  the  early 
printers.  The  most  complete,  the  most  important 
of  all  is  his  Chaucer  (Page  90).  The  decorations  were 
designed  by  Morris,  and  the  drawings  are  said  to 
have  been  done  by  Burne-Jones.  They  were  not. 
They  were  by  two  of  his  pupils  and  friends,  Fairfax 
Murray  and  Catterson  Smith,  but  all  the  same  the 
book  is  beautiful,  and  the  illustrations  were  en- 
graved on  wood  by  W.  H.  Hooper,  who  had  engraved 
the  men  of  the  6o's.  There  are  certain  things  that 
we  may  not  like  about  Morris'  work,  but  I  want 
to  tell  you  that  Morris  carried  out  his  ideas  by 
the  methods  of  the  early  printers  and  the  early 
designers.     He  took  very  little  advantage  of  what 


PAGE    87       ALFRED    PARSONS:      TITLE-PAGE.      PEN     DRAWING 
REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS.      LOANED  BY  THE  ARTIST 


PAGE  88      VV.  MORRIS :   THE  KELMSCOTT  CHAUCER. 
THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


OWNED  BY 


ILLUSTRATION  91 

has  been  done  since.  And  others  have  followed  in 
his  steps  mostly  without  his  success,  because  they 
are  without  his  knowledge,  gained  by  a  lifetime  of 
experiment  and  experience. 

Morris'  books  were  printed  in  his  little  shop  in 
Hammersmith  (Page  93),  and  you  can  see  the  sheets 
in  front  of  the  press  and  the  two  men  working 
in  the  same  way  that  the  printers  of  Venice  worked 
three  or  four  hundred  years  before.  He  believed 
that  was  the  right  way,  the  only  way  to  do  good 
work.  Some  of  us  think  it  was  not,  and  that  work 
can  be  done  as  well  by  taking  advantage  of  our 
present  methods  and  so  carrying  on  tradition. 

There  were  two  men,  however,  who  still  clung, 
and  very  firmly,  to  the  Morris  tradition.  Charles 
Ricketts  and  Charles  Shannon  were  two  artists  who 
worked  together,  and  in  their  illustrations,  type, 
printing,  and  binding  issued  many  volumes  from  the 
Vale  Press,  which  was  run  by  Ballantyne  of  London, 
from  which  came  a  notable  series.  They  designed 
their  type,  made  the  drawings  and  cut  them,  and  they 
did  it  surprisingly  well.  They  also  made  and  issued 
The  Dia/y  the  most  notable  English  artists' journal. 

There  are  a  number  of  other  designers  and 
printers  in  England — Pissarro,  the  son  of  the  painter 
Pissarro,  and  James  Guthrie.  There  are  other 
craftsmen  now  all  over  the  world,  but  if  you  don't 
know  how  to  do  your  own  work,  it  won't  get  done. 
Guthrie,  at  the  Pear  Tree  Press,  is  doing  good  work, 
much  of  it  in  the  manner  of  Blake. 

There  are  other  artists  who  believe  there  are 
other  ways  of  working,  and  one  of  them  was  Howard 
Pyle.  Pyle  believed  that  the  way  the  artists  of 
today  should  work  was  to  take  advantage  of  modern 
methods.    And  he  designed  his  edition  oi  Robin  Hood 


92  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

(Page  93)  from  end  to  end  himself,  yet  instead  of  the 
illustrations  being  cut  on  wood  laboriously  by  hand 
they  were  sent  to  the  photo-engraver  and  engraved 
mechanically  in  the  same  way  the  work  of  Vierge 
was  engraved.  He  used  good  type,  he  spaced  his 
type  well,  and  he  arranged  his  illustrations  on  the 
page  well;  he  drew  not  only  the  decorative  head- 
and  tail-pieces,  but  the  full  pages  and  the  cover, 
and  he  also  wrote  the  story.  And  that  book  made 
an  enormous  sensation  when  it  came  out  here,  and 
even  impressed  greatly  the  very  conservative  William 
Morris,  who  thought  up  to  that  time,  1883,  nothing 
good  artistically  could  come  out  of  America.  But 
Pyle  succeeded  and  produced  several  other  volumes 
by  which  he  made  an  international  reputation. 
At  the  last,  however,  he  became  a  mere  hack,  and, 
dying,  regretted  it.  In  other  of  his  books  you  can 
see  how  carefully,  in  fact,  too  carefully,  he  resur- 
rected the  past.  In  Otto  of  the  Silver  Hand  he  told 
and  illustrated  a  German  story  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  drawings  were  made  in  pen  and  ink,  photo- 
graphed on  to  metal  plates,  and  mechanically  en- 
graved, not  cut  on  wood;  and  that  is  the  way  he 
carried  on  tradition,  the  way  all  the  work  that  I  now 
have  to  show  you  has  been  done,  the  way  we  are 
doing  today,  and  the  right  way  to  carry  on. 

Elihu  Vedder  designed  and  illustrated  Omar 
Khayyam^  a  notable  American  edition  (Page  94). 
The  originals  were  chalk  drawings,  I  think,  or  chalk 
and  wash,  and  the  illustrations  on  each  page  are 
very  well  put  together,  very  well  designed,  and  very 
well  engraved  and  printed.  The  book  was  published 
by  Houghton  Mifflin  Company  early  in  the  8o's,  but 
still  lives  as  a  remarkable  example  of  drawing,  engrav- 
ing, and  printing. 


PAGE     91       HOWARD      PYLE: 
FROM    "ROBIN     HOOD" 


TITLE    AND    ILLUSTRATION 


WILLIAM  MORRIS'  PRINTING  SHOP  AT  HAMMER- 


PAGE    92      ELIHU    VEDDER:     ILLUSTRATION    FROM    "OMAR 
KHAYYAM."      CHALK  DRAWING  REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS 


ILLUSTRATION  95 

I  showed  you  a  few  moments  ago  one  of  Morris' 
presses.  This  is  a  modern  machine  (Page  128)  that 
you  must  encounter,  that  you  have  got  to  tackle  and 
conquer  if  you  want  to  become  really  successful 
illustrators,  engravers,  printers.  This  is  the  sort  of 
monster  on  which  illustrated  books  and  magazines 
are  printed  today. 

But  you  have  got  to  master  it,  and  until  the 
Art  Institute  of  Chicago  begins  to  run  a  printing 
establishment,  and  makes  you  art  students  who  want 
to  learn  illustration  take  that  practical  course,  you 
are  going  to  have  a  pretty  bad  time  when  you  get 
out  in  the  world  and  encounter  the  engravers  and 
printers  who  want  practical  workmen  and  not 
untrained  artists.  You  can  see  what  a  terrible 
monster  the  press  is,  and  it  is  a  very  difficult  thing 
to  subdue,  and  I  tell  you  that  you  must  be  its 
master.  You  cannot  tinker  with  it,  you  will  not  be 
allowed  to  tinker  with  it,  because  if  anything  goes 
wrong  with  the  press  you  will  spoil  thousands  of 
dollars'  worth  of  work,  and  you  have  got  to  know  it 
before  you  will  be  allowed  to  work  for  it  or  with  it. 
But  it  is  your  duty,  in  fact  the  duty  of  the  directors 
of  this  school,  to  start  practical  training,  and  unless 
you  have  this  training,  and  until  you  can  use  what 
you  think  is  your  wonderful  ability,  your  wonderful 
ideas  practically,  you  will  not  be  of  much  use  in  this 
work.  And  that  is  the  trouble  with  the  people  in 
the  United  States;  we  know  everything  except  how 
little  we  do  know  practically.  We  are  as  unpre- 
pared in  art  as  we  were  in  war. 

This  scheme  of  carrying  on  mechanically  the  old 
methods  is  shown  perfectly  in  these  two  designs. 
One  is  by  Diirer,  drawn  and  cut  on  wood,  and  the 
other  a  pen  drawing  mechanically  reproduced  by  a 


96  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

modern  German,  Sattler.  He  has  studied  drawing, 
engraving,  and  printing,  old  and  new,  and  knows 
the  whole  craft  down  to  the  ground.  And  that  is 
what  we  Americans  have  got  to  learn  if  we  want  to 
do  better  work  than  foreigners. 

Here  is  another  design  by  Sattler  (Page  97),  one 
of  the  most  brilliant  of  his  drawings,  done  with  a 
splendid  command  of  the  pen  and  the  brush.  Prob- 
ably that  figure  was  put  in  with  the  brush,  a  solid 
black,  and  the  rest  with  the  pen.  But  see  how  won- 
derfully the  thing  is  done;  an  old  theme,  but  it  is 
carried  out  in  a  new  way,  by  modern  methods,  and 
that  is  what  you  must  learn  to  do. 

Here  is  still  another  German  design  by  Otto 
Greiner.  I  don't  like  the  mixture  of  decoration  and 
realism  which  is  in  that  page,  but  still  it  is  pretty 
well  put  together  in  its  way,  and  marvelously  drawn, 
engraved,  and  printed.  Greiner  was  killed  early  in 
the  war. 

Many  Englishmen  have  followed  in  the  footsteps 
of  Morris.  Herbert  Home  was  one.  This  is  a  page 
from  an  early  magazine.  The  Hobby  Horse.  This 
shows  how,  with  a  pen  and  a  brush,  you  can  get 
richness  of  color  in  a  manner  that  the  old  men  knew 
nothing  about,  and  it  is  all  done  with  a  pen,  and 
mechanically  reproduced. 

Other  forms  of  book  illustrations  have  been 
carried  out.  In  Birmingham,  under  the  influence 
of  Morris,  several  very  brilliant  men  appeared, 
among  them,  E.  H.  New;  he  was  a  young  man  at 
that  time,  but  is  not  so  young  now.  He  applied 
that  old  German  method  to  modern  pen  drawing, 
and  in  a  series  of  portraits  like  this  and  in  book 
plates  he  made  a  reputation.  He  is  now,  and  has 
been  for  years,  making  a  series  of  drawings  of  the 


•mkSmm 


PAGE   96      JOSEPH    SATTLER:    DER    WUNDERFARBER. 
WASH    DRAWING    REPRODUCED    BY    PROCESS 


PEN   AND 


PAGE    99      AUBREY    BEARDSLEY:      ILLUSTRATION    FOR  "MORTE 
D'ARTHUR."      PEN     DRAWING 


ILLUSTRATION  99 

colleges  of  Oxford,  in  what  is  called  the  Loggan 
manner,  bird's-eye  views;  and  he  has  made  them 
into  designs  which  are  quite  as  fine  and  quite  as 
decorative  as  anything  that  was  done  by  Hollar  or 
Loggan  or  any  of  the  old  engravers  who  worked 
in  this  way.  You  see  how  stunningly  the  portrait 
is  drawn.  I  admit  that  it  is  hard  and  conventional, 
but  still  it  is  decorative,  and  is  very  good  work  and 
prints  well,  and  that  is  the  end  of  illustration. 
F.  E.  Griggs  has  also  done  much  good  work  some- 
what in  this  way. 

There  came  a  time  when  a  certain  young  man 
thought  he  could  go  quite  a  bit  farther  than  Morris 
and  Pyle,  and  that  boy,  about  nineteen  years  old 
when  he  made  his  first  important  drawing,  was 
Aubrey  Beardsley.  He  believed  at  that  time  in 
Morris'  work,  but  not  in  Morris'  methods.  In  the 
design  for  his  edition  of  the  Morte  d' Arthur  (Page  98), 
he  carried  out  all  the  old  feeling  in  the  decoration  and 
the  figure  drawing,  and  it  was  perfectly  proper  in  the 
subject  that  he  should  do  so.  His  drawings  were 
done  with  a  pen  and  reproduced  mechanically  by 
Carl  Henschel,  also  an  experimenter,  and  yet  he 
got  results  in  his  published  work  quite  equal  to 
anything  that  Morris  had  done.  But  Beardsley 
was  a  man  who  was  not  contented  with  doing  only 
one  thing,  and  during  the  four  or  five  years  that  he 
was  working  he  was  always  doing  something  new, 
and  by  different  methods.  In  some  he  used  certain 
Japanese  formulas,  in  others  old  Italian,  and  he  went 
on  and  on  doing  more  wonderful  work  until  it 
culminated  in  a  series  of  designs  for  The  Rape  of  the 
Locky  one  of  the  most  perfect  of  modern  books. 

I  shall  never  forget  one  night  when  Beardsley 
was   in   my   place   in   London,   and  Whistler   came 


100  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

in,  and  Whistler  had  never  liked  Beardsley,  and 
Beardsley  knew  it.  He  was  one  of  the  most  sensi- 
tive creatures  that  ever  lived.  He  always  carried  a 
portfolio  containing  some  of  his  work  around  with 
him,  and  when  Whistler  came  in,  Beardsley  opened 
the  portfolio  and  showed  him  his  drawings.  Whistler 
looked  bored,  but  he  showed  him  this  one,  among 
others,  and  Whistler  looked  at  the  drawing,  and 
said,  "Aubrey,  do  you  know  I  have  made  a  mis- 
take. I  didn't  believe  in  you,  but  I  know  now  that 
you  are  a  very  great  artist."  And  the  boy  burst  out 
crying.  That  was  the  type  of  man  Whistler  was. 
You  have  heard  many  things  said  about  him;  you 
have  heard  many  things  said  against  him.  But  I 
wish  to  say  that  he  was  the  most  devoted  friend,  and 
a  most  sincere  critic,  and  most  generous  to  artists 
whom  he  believed  in  and  knew  were  doing  some- 
thing worth  while,  something  that  was  worth  doing; 
and  he  knew  from  that  time  that  Aubrey  Beardsley 
was  the  greatest  designer  England  had  in  modern 
times.  Those  were  almost  his  last  words  to  Beards- 
ley, for  this  was  just  before  his  fatal  illness  was 
coming  on  him,  and  Beardsley  went  from  the  success 
of  his  work  to  the  south  of  France  to  die.  The  lives 
of  two  men,  Keats  and  Beardsley,  are  almost 
identical.  Both  of  them  will  live,  one  in  literature 
and  the  other  in  art,  forever,  and  both  were  killed 
by  criticism — the  spite  of  the  little  toward  the 
great. 

A  Frenchman,  too,  who  was  working  at  the  same 
time,  was  Carlos  Schwabe,  who  made  a  series  of 
illustrations  that  are  very  remarkable,  for  Zola's 
Le  Reve  (Page  loi).  You  can  see  the  feeling  of  the 
old  work  in  this  drawing,  yet  it  is  carried  out  in  the 
new  way.     The  combination  is  perfectly  stunning, 


PAGE  100      CARLOS  SCHWABE:  COVER  AND  TITLE  FOR  "LE  REVE. 
PEN  DRAWING  REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS 


PAGE  103  R.  ANNING  BELL:  JACK  THE  GIANT-KILLER.  FROM 
BANBURY  CROSS  SERIES.  EDITED  BY  GRACE  RHYS.  PUBLISHED 
BY  E.  P.  DUTTON  &.  CO. 


ILLUSTRATION  103 

as  fine  as  anything  I  know  in  the  printed  book. 
And  yet  it  was  pubHshed  in  parts  which  sold,  when 
it  came  out,  for  ten  cents  a  copy. 

Anning  Bell  (Page  102)  is  another  Englishman 
who,  in  a  series  of  children's  books,  one  of  which  is 
the  story  of  Jack  the  Giant-Killer,  from  which  this 
is  taken,  did  some  fine  work.  There  you  see  the  use 
of  simple  pen  lines  in  contrast  with  great  masses  of 
brush  work.  And  again  I  want  to  call  your  atten- 
tion to  the  importance  of  being  able  to  make  your 
masses  tell,  and  to  make  them  in  such  a  way  that  they 
will  print.  That  is  what  is  wanted — not  only  to  get 
drawings  that  will  look  well  on  paper  as  drawings, 
but  you  have  got  to  make  drawings  so  that  the 
mechanical  engraver  or  the  wood  engraver  can  en- 
grave them,  and  the  printing  press  will  print  them. 
It  is  not  the  drawing  you  make  that  counts,  but  it 
is  the  print  that  counts.  It  is  the  printed  page 
which  is  seen.  The  people  may  not  like  it.  That 
does  not  matter.  But  what  does  matter  to  you  is 
that  you  have  got  to  draw  it  so  your  work  will 
print,  and  then  the  people  can  go  hang.  You 
should  not  work  for  the  people,  but  for  yourselves, 
but  you  must  know  how  to  work. 

I  have  not  shown  you  any  drawings,  scarcely, 
in  wash,  for  this  reason.  If  you  make  a  wash  draw- 
ing, you  make  it  just  as  you  make  any  other 
wash  drawing,  but  there  are  certain  things  to  be 
learned.  No  wash  drawing  has  ever  been  printed 
perfectly.  I  do  not  believe  one  ever  will  be.  The 
print  seems  pretty  good  until  you  see  the  original, 
and  then  you  come  suddenly  to  the  conclusion  that 
it  is  usually  pretty  bad.  But  pen  drawings  can  be 
perfectly  facsimiled.  Wash  drawings  cannot,  yet 
they  are  used  everywhere  today. 


104  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Now  we  will  turn  to  another  sort  of  work,  the 
work  of  the  comic  artist.  Though  you  might  not 
have  thought  so,  there  was  more  fun  among  the 
Germans — at  least  before  the  war,  I  don't  think 
there  is  much  now — there  was  more  sense  of  humor 
among  those  people  than  anywhere  else,  and  not 
only  that,  they  knew  how  to  make  funny  draw- 
ings that  would  print,  and  William  Busch,  in  his 
endless  comics  published  in  Fliegende  Blatter^  and 
other  papers,  did  know  how  to  make  drawings  of 
this  kind.  How  many  of  the  artists  on  our  papers 
know  how  to  make  drawings  which  are  comic — 
or  even  artistic?  Compare  drawings  like  that 
with  such  as  appeared  in  The  Chicago  Tribune  this 
morning! 

Forain  is  a  great  French  comic  or  satiric  artist. 
He  has  made  endless  drawings  for  the  Figaro  and 
other  French  papers.  There  are  an  endless  number  of 
men  we  look  at  for  their  humor  and  their  art — they 
want  no  legend  to  explain  them — in  every  country  all 
over  the  world,  there  are  men  who  possess  this  power, 
except  in  this  country.  We  have  scarcely  one  real 
comic  artist,  one  cartoonist.  There  is  one,  and  he 
is  Arthur  Frost  (Page  105).  His  technique  is  not 
good.  It  is,  in  comparison  with  that  of  the  foreigners, 
very  poor.  But  there  is  something  expressive  about 
his  facts  and  fancies  that  the  so-called  American 
caricaturist  doesn't  understand  and  cannot  approach, 
or  come  anywhere  near.  There  is  not  a  single  man 
in  the  United  States  of  America  who  can  make  a 
drawing  like  Frost's,  though  W.  A.  Rogers  is  very 
good  indeed,  yet  every  newspaper  in  the  country 
has  a  cartoonist,  and  a  funny  man,  but  does  anyone 
laugh  at  a  funny  drawing  in  the  newspapers?  You 
weep  for  a  people  who  can  stand  such  rot. 


^ 


PAGE  104      A.  B.  FROST:   OUR  CAT  EATS  RAT  POISON 


^' 


PAGE    107      PHIL    MAY:    THE  PARSON.      PEN   DRAWING   REPRO- 
DUCED BY  PROCESS,   IN    COLLECTION   OF  THE  AUTHOR 


ILLUSTRATION  107 

An  American  who  has  had  a  wonderful  success  is 
Charles  Dana  Gibson.  But  unfortunately  Mr.  Gib- 
son devoted  himself  to  one  sort  of  subject.  He  has 
succeeded  in  that,  but  he  seems  to  have  tired 
of  it.  He  certainly  did,  with  his  Gibson  Girl,  make 
some  very  charming  studies,  but  I  have  no  use 
myself  for  his  political  work,  and  I  think  that  if 
Mr.  Gibson  had  confined  himself  to  his  Girl,  he 
would  be  a  great  deal  better  known  today  artistically, 
and  have  a  considerably  higher  artistic  position 
than  he  has.  I  think  there  are  many  people  who 
can  do  political  caricatures  as  well  as  he  can,  but 
I  don't  think  there  is  anyone  who  has  been  so  suc- 
cessful as  he  has  with  charming  young  persons,  and 
he  has  drawn  them  charmingly.  He  has  endless  imi- 
tators, and  imitation  is  the  source  of  success  today. 
Gibson,  too,  knows  his  craft. 

W.  G.  Baxter,  an  Englishman,  was  a  great  comic 
artist.  Nobody  in  this  country  has  ever  been 
able  to  make  a  design  like  this.  The  character  is 
marvelous.  Nobody  here  has  rendered  that  in  the 
way  that  Baxter  has.  And  yet  it  was  published  in 
a  very  vulgar  comic  paper,  Ally  Slopers  Half- 
Holiday.  But  is  there  anything  among  the  comic 
drawings,  such  as  "The  Gumps,"  or  "Bringing  up 
Father,"  or  anything  of  that  sort,  which  disgrace 
the  American  press  today,  that  comes  anywhere 
near  it?  If  there  is,  I  would  like  to  see  it.  But 
I  cannot  find  it,  nor  can  you.  The  American  comic 
artist  would  be  pathetic,  if  he  were  not  a  disgrace. 

Another  Englishman  was  Phil  May  (Page  io6), 
and  he  was  as  great  an  artist  as  Charles  Keene,  whose 
work  I  showed  you  in  the  last  lecture.  May  really 
cared  for  comic  art,  and  succeeded  in  doing  a  very 
remarkable  series  of  designs  in  Punch.     He  was  one 


108  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

of  the  two  or  three  artists  ever  on  that  paper.  His 
drawings  look  as  though  they  were  knocked  right  off. 
They  were  nothing  of  the  sort.  That  drawing  I 
know,  because  I  saw  him  make  a  part  of  it,  was 
drawn  again  and  again.  The  face  is  a  wonderful 
study.  His  great  aim  was  to  simplify  and  simplify. 
And  although  anyone  who  saw  his  work  might  think 
his  first  attempt  as  near  perfect  as  it  could  be,  yet 
he  would  lay  a  sheet  of  thin  tracing  paper  over  the 
apparently  finished  drawing,  and  go  over  each  line, 
here  and  there  leaving  out  one  or  two,  or  adding 
another,  and  I  have  known  him  to  do  that  several 
times  before  he  was  satisfied.  He,  too,  regarded 
illustration  as  seriously  as  any  other  form  of  art, 
and  that  is  the  reason  why  he  became  a  great  artist. 

In  Holland  and  Belgium  there  are  a  certain 
number  of  men  who  have  taken  up  the  profession 
very  brilliantly  and  in  their  own  way.  This  study 
of  the  Dutch  street  is  notable,  giving  the  Dutch 
feeling  and  character  as  well  as  De  Hoogh  could 
paint  it,  and  it  proves  that  nationality  can  be  given 
to  art  and  to  illustration. 

Here  is  another  by  Garcia  Ramos,  showing  the 
way  in  which  the  modern  man  works  in  Spain.  In 
fact  one  could  go  on  endlessly,  but  you  should  at 
least  see  the  work  of  Tegner  the  Dane  and  Larson 
the  Swede.  You  must  look  in  the  illustrated  maga- 
zines and  books  of  those  countries  and  find  it. 
Paul  Renouard  is  a  great  French  illustrator.  This 
study  (Page  iii),  done  in  chalk,  though  the  chalk 
is  used  in  the  same  way  as  the  pen,  is  as  fine  as  a 
Degas.  His  portraits  are  among  the  most  stunning 
things  I  know  of.  He  has  treated  not  only  the 
Ballet  Girl,  but  politics  and  the  horrors  of  war  in 
the  pages  of  IJ Illustration  and   The  Graphic^  in  a 


ILLUSTRATION  109 

fashion  that  is  utterly  unknown  over  here.  Once 
he  worked  for  Harper  s  Weekly;  now  there  is  no 
Harper  s  or  any  other  similar  weekly  in  this  highly 
civilized  country. 

There  are  one  or  two  men  working  still  who 
believe  in  illustration,  and  this  is  one  of  them,  an  Eng- 
lishman named  E.  J.  Sullivan  (Page  112),  whose  illus- 
trations to  Carlyle's  Sartor  Res artus  are  great  works  of 
art.  He  has  illustrated  a  number  of  other  books.  In 
drawing,  in  arrangement,  in  knowledge  of  line,  they 
are  as  fine  as  anything  that  has  ever  been  done. 

He  does  not  confine  himself  to  this  sort  of  work 
alone,  but  has  illustrated  books  as  diverse  as  Omar 
Khayyam  and  Tom  Brown's  School  DaySy  and  lately 
a  series  of  Caricatures  of  the  Kaiser.  They  are 
all  alike  in  showing  great  knowledge  of  drawing 
and  a  perfect  knowledge  of  how  to  work  for  repro- 
duction. He  is  one  of  the  men  who  has  been  care- 
fully trained  in  the  practical  school  of  the  printing 
office  and  the  newspaper  ofiice,  and  knows  how 
to  make  drawings  that  will  print.  And  not  only 
that,  at  the  present  time  he  is  one  of  the  men  in 
England  who  are  teaching  people  to  draw;  and  he 
can  teach  because  he  can  work  himself. 

An  artist  in  this  country  who  is  doing  -^^ery  good 
work  in  charcoal  is  F.  Walter  Taylor.  This  draw- 
ing (Page  in)  is  taken  from  a  recent  number  of 
Harper  s  Magazine ^  so  it  proves  very  plainly,  though 
there  is  mighty  little  good  work  being  done,  there 
are  some  men,  a  few  in  this  country,  who  are 
trying  to  carry  on,  in  the  right  spirit  by  the  right 
methods,  and  find  that  certain  editors  will  acknowl- 
edge they  are  right  and  accept  their  work. 

Taylor  also  does  excellent  portraits.  I  don't  think 
you  have  seen  anything  I  have  shown  that  is  more 


110  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

stunning  than  this  charcoal  portrait  (Page  127)  which 
he  intends  to  publish  in  some  newspaper  or  magazine. 
It  is  perfectly  done,  and  yet  it  is  done  by  an  illustra- 
tor who  is  hardly  known  in  his  country,  and  outside 
of  it,  scarcely  at  all.  And  yet  he  is  a  very  great 
artist.  Why  do  not  the  American  people  have  their 
portraits  drawn  instead  of  being  photographed  ?  Pos- 
sibly it  is  quicker  and  cheaper;  those  are  our  ideals. 

The  Institute  possesses  a  number  of  charcoal 
drawings  by  F.  Hopkinson  Smith,  which  are  well 
worth  study,  for  Hopkinson  Smith  was  an  interest- 
ing technician  and  understood  drawing  for  the  press, 
invented  it  so  far  as  charcoal  drawing  is  concerned. 
I  must  say  I  never  saw  a  pupil  studying  those  up- 
stairs, or  even  looking  at  them. 

And  there  is  another  thing  a  propos  of  pen  draw- 
ing. I  believe  that  the  rage  for  the  reproduction  of 
bad  oil  paintings  and  worse  water  colors  is  drawing 
to  its  close.  Take  up  any  of  the  magazines  of 
enlightenment  and  public  opinion,  which  circulate 
by  the  millions  in  this  country  today,  which  the 
average  reader  picks  up,  commencing  at  the  back, 
spits  on  his  fingers  and  turns  forward  to  look  at  the 
advertisements,  and  gradually  comes  to  the  illus- 
trations and  the  text,  and  when  he  gets  there 
he  throws  it  away!  Nobody  ever  looks  in  those 
magazines  for  art  or  literature.  They  are  looked  at 
for  advertisements,  and  I  believe  some  ladies  look 
at  them  for  house  furnishings  and  dresses  and  so  on. 
But  to  look  at  them  for  art — there  is  scarce  any 
art  in  them.  There  is  no  art  scarcely  in  the  daily 
papers.  It  is  not  intended  that  there  should  be 
any  art  in  them,  unless  in  the  advertisements.  But 
I  believe  there  is  coming  very  shortly  a  revival 
in  pen  drawing,  and  through  advertising,  and  that 


PAGE  108  PAUL  RENOUARD  :  A  PURVEYOR  OF  LIQUID  REFRESH- 
MENTS FOR  ANARCHISTS.  CHALK  DRAWING  REPRODUCED  BY 
PROCESS.      IN  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 


PAGE  109  F.  WALTER  TAYLOR  :  THE  NURSE.  CHARCOAL  DRAW- 
ING REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS.  DRAWING  LOANED  BY  THE 
ARTIST 


PAGE  109      E.  J.  SULLIVAN:  "SARTOR  RESARTUS. 
REPRODUCED  BY  PROCESS 


PEN  DRAWING 


ILLUSTRATION  113 

is  one  of  the  reasons  why  I  advise  you  to  study  pen 
drawing,  and  if  it  appeals  to  you,  you  may  have  a 
chance  of  doing  something  with  your  work,  if  you 
know  how  to  do  it,something  to  resurrect  illustration. 

Here  is  a  drawing  in  wash  that  is  really  stun- 
ning, by  George  Harding,  the  only  man  properly 
equipped  and  trained  who  was  sent  abroad  to  study 
the  war,  and  the  only  man  who  really  recorded 
the  war.  He  is  the  one  American  who  made  good, 
and  has  made  in  this  design  and  others  a  record  of 
the  part  we  played  in  the  war.  He  is  almost  the 
only  man  who  did  really  good  work  in  any  country. 
Yet  every  other  nation,  England,  France,  and  Italy, 
sent  their  best  men  to  do  this  work.  We  wanted  a 
little  variety  in  this  program,  and  we  sent  some  who 
made  the  most  commonplace  drawings  that  you 
have  ever  seen;   at  least  some  of  them  did. 

Newspaper  illustration  is  another  phase,  and  here 
is  a  design  done  in  the  old  wood-cut  fashion  with  two 
tints,  which  has  been  published  as  a  calendar  and 
is  a  remarkable  example  of  what  can  be  done  by  a 
man  who  knows  how  to  do  it.  The  same  firm, 
the  Franklin  Printing  Company,  has  issued  a 
circular  in  which  the  ideas  of  Morris  have  been 
carried  out  in  newspaper  work;  it  is  that  sort  of 
thing  that  we  want  to  do  today.  It  can  be  done. 
The  only  trouble  is  that  the  average  art  editor 
knows  nothing  about  art;  the  average  engraver 
knows  mighty  little,  and  the  average  printer  doesn't 
care.  That  is  the  reason  why  we  are  submerged 
under  the  rottenest  work  that  was  ever  done  in  this 
world.  The  artists  can  do  good  work,  but  they 
don't  have  the  chance. 

Here  is  another  one  of  those  great  printing 
presses,  a  multiple  machine  (Page  128).     The  paper 


114  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

goes  in,  off  these  rolls,  goes  through  the  various 
cylinders,  and  comes  out  printed  and  folded.  There 
are  two  of  these  presses  coupled  together.  And 
although  Diirer  would  be  contented  probably  with 
forty  or  fifty  proofs  of  one  of  his  blocks  in  a  day, 
those  two  machines  I  believe  will  turn  out  a  hundred 
thousand  copies  of  a  completed  newspaper  in  an 
hour.  And  that  is  the  kind  of  monster  you  have 
got  to  work  for,  and  have  got  to  know  and  have 
got  to  manage,  and  it  does  take  some  study  and 
training. 

Franklin  Booth  (Page  ii8)  understands  the 
machine.  This  effective  design  came  out  in  a  daily 
paper  only  a  week  or  two  ago,  and  prints  remarkably 
well,  and  is  an  example  of  how  one  should  work  for 
cheap  and  rapid  newspaper  and  magazine  work. 
He  has  been  successful,  and  his  technique  is  now 
imitated  by  every  little  thief  in  the  land  who  can 
imitate  but  not  invent. 

There  are  endless  ways  of  drawing  for  the  papers. 
Here  is  another,  a  very  clever  drawing  done  by 
an  Englishman — and  when  I  say  "clever,"  I  mean 
"good."  Look  at  the  way  he  makes  his  solid 
blacks,  yet  the  artist  has  broken  all  his  blacks  up 
in  small  dots,  and  got  a  remarkable  bit  of  color,  and 
it  has  printed  well. 

One  could  go  on  forever.  This  design  (Page  117) 
in  the  NewYork  Evening  Post  is  by  a  man,  C.  B.  Falls, 
whom  I  don't  think  you  appreciated  at  all  in  Chicago. 
He  studied  in  this  school,  and  he  has  gone  to  New 
York,  and  is  doing  in  his  way  some  of  the  best  work 
in  the  United  States.  But  he  learned  his  craft  in 
New  York  shops;  he  could  not  learn  it  in  this  school. 
He  is  a  highly  skilled  technician,  a  highly  trained 
artist. 


I 


ILLUSTRATION  115 

This  newspaper  advertisement  (Page  119)  was 
taken  from  Jugend,  one  of  the  German  newspapers, 
just  before  the  war,  a  wonderful  thing,  an  advertise- 
ment of  Benedictine.  If  we  were  advertising  that 
here,  and  making  a  drawing  for  the  advertisement, 
we  would  put  in  a  great  many  details,  and  in  one 
corner,  perhaps  half-hidden,  we  would  put  the 
thing  we  are  advertising,  but  these  people  wanted 
to  advertise  Benedictine,  and  they  do  it  in  a 
direct  way,  and  in  a  telling  way,  yet  it  is  a  work 
of  art. 

This  is  one  of  those  things  that  was  printed  at  the 
rate  of  a  hundred  thousand  copies  an  hour  in  the  New 
York  Times,  a  reproduction  of  a  lithograph  made 
some  years  ago  (Page  120).  They  are  doing  no  such 
work  today  in  New  York,  but  it  is  a  proof  that  a 
thing  done  technically  right  will  print,  because  it 
was  printed,  and  it  was  syndicated,  electrotypes  or 
moulds  sent  all  over  the  land,  and  there  were  several 
million  copies  of  it  on  the  same  day,  in  papers  pub- 
lished all  over  the  country. 

I  am  not  impressing  upon  you  so  much  the 
artistic  side  as  the  technical  side  of  illustration,  for 
that  is  most  important.  Unless  you  are  technically 
trained  you  cannot  do  technical  work,  and  illustra- 
tion is  technical. 

This  is  the  sort  of  thing  that  the  American  public 
now  loves.  This  is  the  kind  of  thing  we  have  come 
to.  And  it  is  going  to  get  worse.  I  showed  this 
slide  in  Washington  the  other  day,  and  I  also  had  a 
paper  containing  more  drawings  of  the  sort,  and 
after  advising  the  people  and  telling  them  what  I 
thought  of  that  wonderful  design,  and  what  I  thought 
of  a  nation  that  could  appreciate  such  pathetic 
rubbish,  such  a  disgrace  to  art,  a  lady  came  up  to 


116  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

me  after  I  had  concluded,  and  she  said,  "Would 
you  mind  giving  me  that  copy  of  the  paper  that 
you  put  in  your  pocket,  because  I  want  to  take  it 
home  to  Sammy,  he  likes  those  things  so  much." 
That  is  the  kind  of  thing  that  Sammy  is  being 
brought  up  on,  and  when  Sammy  grows  up  he  will 
never  get  away  from  it.  It  is  our  duty  to  get  Sammy 
away  from  that  rot,  and  to  stop  papers  from  printing 
that  sort  of  thing,  or  this  country  is  doomed  artis- 
tically. And  the  only  way  to  stop  it  is  to  train 
illustrators  properly,  and  to  train  them  to  show  by 
their  work  that  illustration  is  a  serious  profession. 
It  is  almost  alone  in  what  is  known  as  commercial 
art,  commercial  illustration,  that  we  are  doing  any 
art  work  of  any  value — though  what  sort  of  art  is 
there  which  is  not  commercial?  But  it  is  in  adver- 
tising art,  to  the  advertising  pages  of  the  maga- 
zines and  papers  that  we  must  turn  today  for  our 
illustration.  Americans  are  become  a  race  of  shop- 
keepers, and  they  believe  today  they  must  adver- 
tise— tomorrow  they  will  do  some  other  stunt — but 
today  it  is  art  in  advertising.  Most  of  it  is  artless — 
a  hodge-podge  of  photographs  and  frills.  But  there 
is  some  good  work  done,  though  you  have  got  to 
wade  through  oceans  of  rubbish  on  the  back  pages 
to  find  it.  One  phase  is  that  so  completely  sterilized 
and  standardized  have  we  become  that  no  sooner 
does  some  artist  evolve  a  style  of  his  own,  or  rather 
a  technical  mannerism,  than  a  whole  horde  of  imi- 
tators pounce  on  it. 

Lately  Mr.  Franklin  Booth  did  this,  as  I  have 
said.  He  worked  out  a  combination  of  white  line 
and  oil  paint  handling,  in  pen  and  ink,  which  was 
amusing  and  printed  well.  Instantly  a  gang  of 
thieves   and  prigs   and  ad  men  and  business  men 


PAGE  114      C.  B.  FALLS:   WOOD   BLOCK   DRAWN  AND  CUT  BY 
THE  ARTIST 


PAGE  114       FRANKLIN  BOOTH:   PEN  DRAWING  FOR  NEWSPAPER 
ADVERTISEMENT  REPRODUCED   BY    PROCESS 


PAGE   115       ADVERTISEMENT  FROM  "JUGEND."  A  GERMAN  PAPER. 
PEN    DRAWING    REPRODUCED   BY    PROCESS 


tVltmVitnAc9Simtf$ 


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-l.t.    «l     l»t     J.l>«m.     €.>.rl.ll,     (,,     t>,     «„    |„t     i 


PAGE  115      JOSEPH  PENNELL:  STEAM  SHOVEL,  PANAMA.      LITHO- 
GRAPH    REPRODUCED    AND    PRINTED    IN    "NEW    YORK    TIMES" 


ILLUSTRATION  121 

seized  it  and  did  things  which  they  thought  just 
as  good,  but  which  we  artists  know  are  rotten, 
meaningless,  and  senseless.  This,  however,  is 
true  of  all  American  art;  we  as  a  nation  have 
nothing  to  say  for  ourselves,  so  we  imitate  the 
one  who  has. 

There  is  in  this  commercial  art,  however,  mostly 
no  real  knowledge  of  how  to  draw  for  rapid  printing, 
how  to  draw  at  all,  but  some  of  the  designs  are  very 
interesting,  though  usually  ruined  by  the  worst  of 
lettering  or  type,  which  usually  cuts  right  into 
them.  The  fool  ad  man  and  the  fool  business  man 
are  too  stupid  to  know  that  a  work  of  art,  so  well 
done  and  so  well  carried  out  and  printed  that  one 
will  want  to  keep  it  and  will  remember  the  legend 
beneath  it,  will  be  framed,  while  the  same  subject 
defaced  and  disfigured  by  type  and  lettering  will 
be  chucked  away  as  only  an  ad.  But  the  business 
man  and  the  ad  man  have  art  by  the  throat;  they 
know  nothing  of  art,  and  yet  they  dump  their 
notions  of  it  on  the  people — a  people  who  have 
sujffered  long,  but  are  artless. 

There  are  revivals  in  art  as  in  other  things. 
Today  the  wood  cut,  the  oldest  form  of  illustration, 
has  been  revived,  but  while  in  the  past  both  in  the 
East  and  West  wood  cutting  was  practiced  by  the 
greatest  masters,  today  it  is  mostly  tampered  with 
by  the  greatest  duffers.  Incompetence  and  igno- 
rance have  taken  the  place  of  skill  and  knowledge 
and  craftsmanship.  Originality  among  duffers  has 
momentarily  ousted  tradition,  only  the  duffers 
don't  know  that  their  best  work  is  but  a  bad  imita- 
tion of  what  was  better  done  centuries  ago,  or  else 
they  deliberately  prig  and  steal  and  lie,  saying  they 
never  saw  what  they  have  stolen.     Many  are  put  in 


122  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

high  places,  when  they  should  be  fined  for  infringe- 
ment of  copyright.  But  critics  of  art  in  this  country 
are  still  more  ignorant,  mostly,  and  we  have  no 
standards  of  art  or  morals.  Let  one  man  work  out 
or  resurrect  something  that  is  interesting — a  dozen 
immediately  copy  it.  We  think  we  are  an  inven- 
tive, idealistic  nation.  We  are  too  often  cheap 
imitators  and  low-down  thieves. 

The  wood  block  or  process  block  can  be  printed 
with  letter  press,  and  therefore  it  is  most  used  today. 
The  drawing  may  either  be  drawn  on  or  photo- 
graphed on  a  plank  of  cherry  or  pear  wood,  or  the 
cross-section  of  a  piece  of  boxwood — if  any  decent 
wood  has  been  left  by  the  billboard  men.  Or  it 
may  when  drawn  on  paper  be  photographed  on  to 
the  wood.  Linoleum  and  thick  oilcloth  can  also 
be  cut  and  are  much  used  abroad.  The  drawing 
should  be  done  in  one  of  two  ways — either  made  on 
wood  or  paper  in  firm  lines  sufficiently  far  apart 
not  to  clog  up  in  the  printing  press,  yet  not  too  far, 
so  as  to  allow  the  paper  to  sag  and  smear  the  design, 
with  pen,  pencil,  or  brush  charged  with  india  ink 
or  some  other  strong  black,  for  it  must  be  remem- 
bered, first  of  all,  that  all  lines  print  equally  black — 
or  should  in  the  press — and  that  strength  of  color 
in  cheap,  rapid  printing  cannot  be  varied.  The 
only  way  in  which  tone  can  be  got,  or  different 
strength  of  color,  is  by  making  the  stronger  blacks 
with  broader  lines.  Another  method  of  making 
wood  cuts  is  to  blacken  the  whole  face  of  the  block 
and  then  to  draw  the  design  in  white  upon  it  with 
the  graver  or  knife.  You  make  some  very  clever 
studies  in  white  chalk  or  color  on  brown  paper 
in  the  schools — they  are  of  no  value  to  print 
from.     Why  don't    the  teachers   teach  you   to  cut 


ILLUSTRATION  123 

them  in  wood,  then  you  might  learn  something 
practical. 

Having  the  design  on  the  block,  the  wood  cutter 
should  carefully,  with  a  knife  or  a  graver,  cut  a  line 
in  the  wood  on  each  side  of  the  black  line  or  mass, 
cutting  a  simple  narrow  line  to  start  with,  then 
with  a  chisel  or  gouge  dig  out  the  big  white  spaces 
on  each  side  of  it.  Crosshatching  should  be  avoided 
as  much  as  possible,  for,  though  it  is  easy  enough 
to  draw,  the  spaces  between  the  crosshatched 
lines  are  very  difficult  to  cut  out.  Therefore, 
not  only  for  printing  but  for  engraving,  the  lines 
and  masses  should  be  kept  separate  and  as  far 
apart  as  possible.  When  the  block  is  blacked  and 
the  drawing  made  in  white,  the  whites  are  gone 
over  with  a  graver,  thus  cutting  them  into  the 
block,  and  the  cut  or  engraving  is  thus  made  in 
white  lines  which  will  print — as  the  lines  are  lowered 
and  the  black  surface  alone  will  take  the  ink.  This 
is  white-line  engraving,  the  method  of  Bewick. 
The  black  line,  cutting  the  surface  away  on  either 
side  of  the  lines,  is  the  method  of  Diirer  and  the 
Japanese.  With  sufficient  technical  skill,  white- 
line  engraving  can  be  done  out  of  doors,  as  it  is 
a  direct  method.  As  the  black  block  is  cut,  the 
lines  may  be  filled  with  whiting,  and  it  will  look 
exactly  as  it  will  print. 

All  American  wood  engravings  of  the  more 
elaborate  sort  are  done  in  white  line  on  the  black 
block,  though  at  times  both  methods  are  employed 
by  skilful  men  on  the  same  block.  The  English 
wood  engravings  of  the  sixties  were  done  in  the  older 
way,  the  black  lines  drawn  on  the  block  left  stand- 
ing. The  drawings  were  usually  done  in  pencil;  if 
wash  was  used,  the  engraver  had  to  cut  it  into  lines. 


124  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

But  the  great  thing  is  to  take  advantage  of  and 
retain  the  blacks,  making  bold  strong  lines  and 
leaving  big  strong  forms  in  black. 

In  either  case  study  Diirer,  the  Japanese,  and 
the  work  of  modern  men  like  Lepere,  Valloton, 
Nicholson,  and  Ricketts.  Do  not  be  led  away 
by  incompetents  and  poseurs;  clumsiness  is  not  art, 
and  incompetence  is  not  genius.  The  greatest  works 
in  any  medium  were  done  by  the  most  skilful, 
the  most  highly  trained  artists,  and  it  is  as  difficult 
for  an  artist  to  put  down  lines  the  wood  cutter  or 
engraver  can  follow  without  having  to  cut  new  ones 
as  it  is  to  cut  or  engrave.  If  the  artist  makes  and 
cuts  his  own  blocks,  he  will  learn  this  soon  enough — 
and  if  his  lines  are  not  good  and  an  engraver  does 
the  cutting,  he  will  learn  how  bad  they  are,  and  the 
result  will  be  a  shock  to  him. 

The  block  may  either  be  put  on  the  press,  or  an 
electrotype  or  stereotype  plate  made  from  it  and 
printed;  if  some  of  the  fools  who  make  etchings  to 
be  reproduced  and  printed  would  try  to  make  wood 
blocks,  they  might  find  out  how  bad  their  work 
usually  is.  But,  then,  it  is  much  easier  to  make  a 
bad  etching  than  a  good  wood  block.  For  some 
reason  a  bad  etching  has  a  great  fascination  for 
ignorant  people,  who  are  gravely  impressed  with  it. 

Process  mechanical  engraving  has  relieved  us, 
however,  of  the  necessity  of  cutting  or  engraving 
designs  on  blocks.  There  is  no  question  that  the 
wood  with  its  grain,  and  the  linoleum  with  its 
soft  material,  give  a  quality,  a  depth  and  richness 
to  the  line  and  mass  that  the  hard  metal  plate  will 
not  yield.  Note,  in  any  good  Japanese  print,  how 
the  grain  of  the  wood  is  taken  advantage  of,  some- 
times   making    a    pattern    and    aiding    the    design. 


ILLUSTRATION  125 

The  metal  plate  is  utterly  unsympathetic  in  printing, 
but  most  responsive  to  any  line. 

Drawings  in  line,  like  wood  cuts,  can  now  be  made 
with  any  sort  of  a  point,  lead  pencil,  brush,  pen,  litho- 
graphic chalk,  crayon,  charcoal;  if  they  are  to  be 
reproduced  in  line  the  artist  must  work  on  his 
sheet  of  paper  with  the  same  care  as  in  making 
a  drawing  for  wood  cutting.  He  can  Crosshatch, 
but  for  our  modern  rapid  printing  all  the  lines 
must  be  open  and  all  black.  He  may,  however,  use 
a  rough  or  grained  paper,'  and  this  will  break  up 
the  lines  and  give  a  grey  effect  to  them.  But  he 
will  find,  save  in  the  better  magazines,  and  even  there 
the  printing  has  degenerated,  he  will  often  get  blacks 
when  he  wants  greys  and  greys  where  there  should 
be  blacks,  owing  to  poor  ink  and  careless,  union- 
ized printing. 

But  the  most  certain  method  is  to  use  smooth 
white  paper  and  strong  black  ink.  There  are  also 
tinted  ruled  papers  which  may  be  scratched  into 
half-tones  and  then  lights.  The  drawing  should 
be  not  only  carefully  thought  out,  but  carefully 
worked  out. 

Phil  May  made  elaborate  pencil  drawings  before 
he  inked  them  in,  and  then  often  laid  a  piece  of  thin 
transfer  paper  on  the  pen  drawing  and  redrew  it, 
leaving  out  unnecessary  lines  and  strengthening 
others,  and  continuing  this  till  he  got  by  repeated 
work  the  fresh,  spontaneous  quality  he  wanted. 

Forain's  drawings  are  not  knocked  off.  He  is  a 
big  enough  artist  to  know  that  freshness  and  spon- 
taneity are  the  results  of  long  and  hard  work.  Here 
such  elementary  facts  are  not  known,  and  geniuses 
who  come  today  and  go  before  tomorrow  knock 
off  masterpieces  which  are  the  delight  of  the  cultured. 


126  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

So  far  as  I  have  seen  him  work,  Beardsley  never 
made  a  pencil  drawing,  but  put  a  few  Hnes  on  his 
paper  and  started  in  with  a  pen.  Abbey  and 
Charles  Keene  greyed  and  diluted  their  lines,  but 
to  get  the  proper  effect  on  the  pages  all  their  grey 
lines  have  to  be  gone  over  with  a  graver,  or  rou- 
lette, by  the  engraver,  for  if  they  are  not,  they  will 
print  perfectly  black.  I  began  by  making  elaborate 
pencil  drawings  and  inking  lines  over  and  around 
th'em.  This  was  the  method  of  Rico  and  Vierge, 
the  right  method.  Colored  inks,  too,  should  be 
avoided,  as  the  camera  is  no  respecter  of  color,  and 
beautiful  blue  inks  may  disappear  completely,  and 
rich  reds  turn  pot  black. 

The  same  is  true  of  lead  pencil,  which  from  its 
shine  and  greyness  is  bad  for  reproduction.  Char- 
coal, crayon,  and  lithographic  chalk  are  much  better 
for  line  drawings,  as  they  are  dead  black  and  any 
shine  or  glitter  in  the  drawing  may  photograph  badly. 

There  is,  however,  a  method  of  reproducing 
drawings  which  are  grey,  or  shiny,  or  smeared,  and 
incompetents  take  refuge  in  these  defects,  but  if  a 
line  drawing  has  any  of  these  defects  or  qualities, 
it  must  be  reproduced  by  "half-tone"  and  not 
direct-line  process.  By  this  method  almost  any- 
thing can  be  reproduced  and  very  wonderfully 
reproduced,  too,  but  this  method  cannot  be  satis- 
factorily used  for  cheap  and  rapid  printing,  and  also 
it  is  twice  as  expensive  as  the  direct-line  process. 
"  It  might  be  well  again  to  explain  both;  the  illus- 
trator must  understand  them  and  their  requirements. 
The  line  drawing  is  photographed  on  to  a  sensitized 
copper  or  zinc  plate,  where  it  appears  in  black, 
usually  reduced  in  size.  This  ability  to  reduce  or 
enlarge  the  drawing  and  also  to  reverse  it  for  printing 


PAGE  110      F.  WALTER  TAYLOR:   CHARCOAL  PORTRAIT 


PAGE  113      MODERN  MULTIPLE  HOE  PRINTING  PRESS 


ILLUSTRATION  129 

is  one  of  the  aids,  the  most  important  one  we  have, 
from  photography.  The  photographic  print  on  the 
metal  plate  is  then  washed,  the  photographic  film 
disappears,  save  the  lines  of  the  drawing,  or  all 
the  blank  spaces  are  got  rid  of  in  some  of  the 
endless  patented  fashions.  The  plate  (usually  a 
number  of  them)  is  put  in  an  acid  bath,  and  the 
exposed  part  of  the  plate  is  bitten  away.  It  is  then 
taken  out,  looked  over,  heated,  when  the  ink  runs 
down  the  sides  of  the  lines  and  protects  them,  and 
the  biting  is  continued  until  the  design  stands  up 
from  the  acid-lowered  plate.  Large  spaces  are  dug 
out  by  gouges  and  machines  called  "routers."  When 
bitten  the  plate  is  mounted  on  a  wood  block  the 
height  of  the  type  and  is  ready  to  print  from.  This 
is  the   theory  of  mechanical  line  engraving. 

In  engraving  wash  drawings  or  paintings,  the 
wood  engraver  cuts  parallel  lines  or  series  of  dots 
through  the  washes  or  tones,  thus  breaking  them 
up  into  a  printing  surface,  as  the  screen  does  me- 
chanically. In  printing,  blacks  can  be  reduced  and 
greys  strengthened  either  by  cutting  the  face  of 
the  block  down  or  by  pulling  proofs,  cutting  them 
up,  and  putting  the  cut-out  blacks  over  or  under 
the  block  on  the  press.  This  gives  increased  pres- 
sure in  the  press  and  increases  the  color  where  it 
is  wanted.  This  is  known  as  underlaying  or  over- 
laying. But  today  it  is  almost  useless  for  the  artist 
to  look  to  the  printer  to  help  him — he  must  make 
his  drawing  as  nearly  the  way  he  wants  it  to  print 
as  he  can,  and  take  no  chances. 

By  the  second  method,  which  is  used  for  all 
other  drawings,  in  fact  for  reproducing  everything 
not  in  line  or  not  pure  black,  the  drawing  is 
photographed    through    very    finely    ruled    screens. 


130  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

containing  some  hundreds  of  lines  to  the  square  inch. 
This  is  done  to  break  up  tones  or  to  prevent  greys 
from  printing  black.  An  oil  painting  could  not  be 
reproduced  by  the  line  process,  but  can  by  this. 
The  lines  in  the  ruled  screens  tell  as  whites  on  the 
darks  of  the  design  and  as  blacks  on  the  light  por- 
tions. They  can  easily  be  seen  by  magnifying  any 
reproduction  of  a  painting  or  photograph  printed  in 
a  book  or  paper.  When  the  design  is  photographed 
on  to  the  metal  plate,  it  is  bitten  or  etched  more  or 
less  in  the  same»way  as  a  line  block.  This  work 
can  now  be  done  in  as  few  hours  as  the  old  men 
spent  weeks  in  engraving  on  wood.  Whites  may  be 
etched  out  by  this  method  as  in  the  line  process,  or 
dug  out  by  engravers. 

The  screen  has  been  a  great  blessing  and  a  great 
curse  to  illustration.  By  its  use  paintings  can 
be  reproduced  and  any  sort  of  drawing;  conse- 
quently a  tribe  of  money  grubbers  have  arisen  who 
can't  draw,  can't  paint,  but  they  have  formed  a 
combine,  and  the  screen  and  the  artless  editor  are 
altogether  responsible  for  the  utter  downfall  of 
American  illustration.  For  a  while  editors  believed 
they  could  drive  artists  out  of  the  magazines  by 
photography.  People  got  sick  of  it.  But  they 
have  standardized  and  sterilized  artists  in  a  fashion 
to  delight  a  prohibitionist.  Some  day — and  there 
are  signs — illustration  may  revive,  but  today  it  is 
rotten  in  America,  like  the  country  and  the  artless 
people.  This  sort  of  popular  person  has  debauched 
the  country.  He  knows  nothing  of  art,  or  engrav- 
ing, or  printing.  Cash  is  his  only  aim,  ideal,  ambi- 
tion.    I  believe  he  gains  it. 

Drawings,  however,  may  be  intelligently  pre- 
pared for  the  half-tone  process  in  wash  or  oil,  but 


ILLUSTRATION  131 

by  either  one  the  screen  deadens,  lowers,  flattens 
them,  even  with  the  greatest  care  in  photography 
and  etching^and  the  printing  press  usually  ruins 
what  is  left.  The  drawings  should  be  made  in 
black  and  white  monochrome — in  water  color 
charcoal  grey  is  excellent — in  oil  each  artist  has 
his  own  scheme.  Some  use  gouache  and  tinted 
paper,  or  body  color.  There  is  no  rule  and  no  cer- 
tain result,  save  that  color  is  bad.  They  are 
reproduced  without  any  etching  out  or  engraving 
out  of  whites,  or  hammering  up  blacks.  The  art 
editor  thinks  a  black  should  be  like  shoe  polish  and 
a  white  like  a  shirt  front  used  to  be.  The  only 
way  to  get  the  proper  effect  is  to  leave  the  flat 
screen  dots  all  over  the  block;  this  simply  lowers  the 
tone,  which  the  art  editor  doesn't  like,  so  he  digs 
a  hole  in  the  block  to  get  an  efi^ect  and  prints  it  in 
yellow  or  green,  and  the  photo-engraver  scratches  a 
corner  and  planes  ofi^  the  side,  and  the  printer 
souses  it  in  ink,  and  these  and  many  other  things 
account  for  the  artlessness  of  the  American  art  paper. 
No  amount  of  reproduction,  no  method  will  make 
bad  paintings  into  good  illustrations,  and  it  is 
with  bad  art  most  of  bad  journalism  reeks.  The 
editors  and  the  public  neither  know  nor  care  how 
the  unsalable  painting  flaunts  as  an  illustration, 
the  delight  of  the  vulgar  herd.  It  is  ridiculous 
to  say  color  can  be  reproduced  by  the  present 
mechanical  methods.  How  can  a  painting,  which 
has  no  pure  red  or  blue  or  yellow  in  it,  be  copied 
by  the  use  of  raw  reds,  blues,  and  yellows?  The 
engraver  and  printer  must  use  the  colors  the  artist 
used,  and  the  artist  must  know  what  colors  to  use, 
what  colors  will  reproduce  and  print.  Both  must 
study  this  in  a  -technical  school.     As  a  proof  of  the 


132  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

success  of  the  three-color  method,  let  the  photo- 
engraver  try  to  reproduce  a  piece  of  undrawn-on 
grey  paper  by  this  process. 

Color  can  be  reproduced  and  printed  only  as  the 
Japanese  have  used  it  in  their  color  prints — by 
drawing  the  design  in  flat  tones  as  a  mosaic,  as  all 
good  color  printers  have  done,  printing  the  colors 
one  after  another,  side  by  side — that  is  the  only 
way,  the  way  good  work  alone  can  be  done.  Three- 
color  processes,  in  which  red,  yellow,  and  blue 
blocks  are  used  to  get  effects  by  superposition  and 
secondary  or  other  color  combinations,  are  very 
wonderful,  but  they  are  not  art;  but  in  a  nation  of 
canned  musicians  and  margarine-eaters  cold-stored, 
three-colored  art  is  bound  to  be  popular — with  all 
but  artists,  and  what  do  they  amount  to.'' 

To  make  color  prints,  as  many  blocks  must  be  cut 
as  there  are  colors.  The  artist  must  mix  the  colors 
himself  and  put  them  on  one  by  one,  colors  that 
will  print.  This  method  can  be  employed  for 
rapid  printing.  It  is  the  only  right  one.  The 
three-color  scheme  can  be  seen  on  the  cover  of  any 
magazine,  each  more  artless  than  the  other.  The 
artist  must  be  prepared  to  have  meaningless,  artless 
tints  of  blue,  brown,  or  green  stuck  over  his  drawings 
by  artless  editors  and  printers,  the  drawings  cut 
in  half  and  put  on  two  pages  facing  each  other, 
bits  cut  clean  off — in  fact  there  is  no  end  to  the 
barbarities,  vulgarities,  and  inanities  the  art  editor 
will  perpetrate  on  an  artist's  design  after  it  has 
left  his  hands. 

With  proper  technical  schools,  national  schools, 
we  would  get  skilled  workmen,  men  and  women  too, 
who  understand  the  printing  art.  We  would  then 
again   take  the  place  we  have  lost-  as   the  leading 


ILLUSTRATION  133 

nation  in  the  world  of  graphic  arts,  a  proud  place 
we  once  held.  It  is  the  duty  of  this  Institute  to 
give  you  students  a  chance,  and  it  would  pay 
artistically  and  financially. 


OLD     HAND    PRESS     FOR 
PRINTING  WOOD    CUTS 


PAGE  150      A.  BOSSE:   ETCHERS  AT  WORK.      ETCHING 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  ETCHING 
THE  ETCHERS  THIRD  LECTURE  TUESDAY 
APRIL  13  1920 

LAST  week  I  tried  to  talk  to  you  about  Illus- 
tration, and  this  week  I  want  to  take  up  the 
^  subject  of  Etching.  Both  are  forms  of  Graphic 
Art,  and  after  Illustration,  Etching  is  the  next  older 
form.  I  told  you  last  week  that  Illustration  dates 
back  to  the  very  earliest  ages.  Etching,  however, 
as  we  know  it,  is  a  much  later  product,  and  begins 
with  the  Middle  Ages. 

The  earliest  forms  of  etchings  were  prints  made 
from  designs  by  goldsmiths,  silversmiths,  and  other 
metal  workers,  as  a  record  for  themselves,  or  in 
order  to  show  to  their  clients  patterns  and  designs. 
These  designs  were  mostly  for  sword  hilts  and  other 
decorative  work  in  metal  and  were  made  by  drawing 
the  lines  on  the  surface  of  a  metal  plate  through  an 
acid-resisting  varnish,  or  cutting  them  directly  into 
the  metal  with  a  graver,  of  which  I  showed  you  the 


136  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

form  in  the  first  lecture,  rubbing  into  the  sunken 
lines  black  paint,  placing  on  the  surface  of  the 
metal  decorated  a  piece  of  paper,  and  rubbing  it 
on  the  back,  in  the  same  way  that  the  Japanese  to- 
day make  their  wood  cuts,  by  rubbing.  The  ink 
came  out  of  the  lines  upon  the  paper  which  was 
rubbed.  The  lines  were  filled  with  black  enamel 
later.  This  form  of  work  was  known  as  Niello. 
Casts  are  also  said  to  have  been  made  and  printed 
from.  There  was  no  intention  on  the  part  of 
these  craftsmen  to  make  prints,  but  they  did  make 
prints  despite  themselves,  and  it  occurred  to  artists 
that  this  method  might  be  used  for  engraving  or 
etching  flat  surfaces  of  metal  by  multiplying  these 
rubbings.  It  would  be  easy  to  trace  this,  if  I  had 
the  time,  but  it  has  been  done  in  a  previous 
course  by  Mr.  Carrington,  Etching  and  Engrav- 
ings who  discussed  the  old  work.  But  if  I  want 
to  talk  about  modern  work,  there  is  so  much  to 
talk  about  that  I  can  refer  to  only  the  most 
notable  work  that  was  done  in  the  past  and  to 
only  the  most  notable  work  in  the  present.  Yet 
among  the  artists  of  the  past  were  men  whose 
work  we  have  never  surpassed.  The  greatest  were 
Diirer  and  Rembrandt.  Whistler,  however,  has  sur- 
passed Rembrandt  as  an  etcher.  Diirer  lives  as  an 
engraver. 

Diirer's  engravings  in  metal  have  never  been 
approached  in  modern  times,  by  modern  artists. 
He  made  but  few  etchings,  and  those  etchings  were 
done,  not  on  copper,  but  on  iron.  Why,  I  do  not 
know,  or  what  sort  of  acid  he  used  to  bite  them. 
The  only  thing  of  any  importance  is  that  he  used 
the  same  tools  to  make  these  etchings  as  he  did 
for  his  metal    engravings — the  same  tools  we  use. 


ETCHING  137 

That  is,  all  of  this  work  was  evidently,  from  the 
form  and  the  shape  of  the  line,  drawn  with  a  graver — 
drawn  very  lightly.  First  he  covered  the  whole 
face  of  his  plate  with  an  acid-resisting  varnish  and 
drew  through  that  varnish  with  a  graver,  and  not 
with  an  etching  point,  as  in  this  "Great  Cannon."  I 
am  certain  he  made  the  lines  with  a  graver  lightly 
on  the  metal.  Anyone  who  has  had  any  experi- 
ence can  tell  that  they  look  like  engraver's  lines 
and  not  like  etcher's  lines. 

But  instead  of  doing  as  the  etcher  does  in  order 
to  get  strength  and  depth  and  perspective,  biting 
these  lines  for  various  lengths  of  time,  the  faintest 
lines  bitten  only  a  few  minutes,  the  stronger  ones 
several  minutes  more,  and  the  deep  dark  ones  for 
many  minutes  longer,  it  is  perfectly  evident  that  all 
the  biting  was  done  at  once,  because  they  are  of 
different  width,  but  the  same  depth — different-sized 
tools  were  used.  The  blacks  are  made  by  putting 
the  lines  closer  together  and  not  by  deeper  biting. 
If  you  will  compare  a  metal-engraved  portrait  by 
Diirer — and  there  are  many  of  them  in  the  print 
collection — with  an  etched  portrait  by  Rembrandt, 
you  will  see  what  I  mean.  It  is  almost  impossible 
to  tell  you  or  explain  the  difference  any  more  than 
I  have  done.  Though  in  the  engraving  the  line  is 
firm  and  sharp,  in  the  etching  it  is  ragged  and 
varies  in  firmness.  You  have  to  feel  these  things. 
But  the  great  thing  about  this  "Cannon"  by 
Diirer  (Page  139)  is  the  amazing  way  in  which  he 
has  got  the  light  and  shade  and  expressed  the  differ- 
ent qualities  of  surface  and  the  different  objects  in 
the  composition  in  simple,  pure,  open  line. 

Look  at  the  ground  around  the  "Cannon." 
Those  of  you  who  remember  the  design  I  showed 


138  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

you  by  the  British  artist,  Sir  John  Millais,  must 
see  that  he  got  his  idea  for  that  Httle  illustration 
to  The  Parables  from  studying  the  stony  foreground 
of  Dijrer's  "Cannon"  done  three  hundred  years 
before.  And  what  could  be  finer  than  the  drawing 
of  the  "Cannon,"  unless  the  drawing  of  the  land- 
scape— the  whole  is  a  masterpiece.  It  was  done  on 
iron.  Steel  was  not  used  until  the  beginning  of  the 
last  century. 

I  am  not  going  to  say  anything  more  about 
metal  engraving,  only  call  attention  to  the  work 
by  Mantegna  and  also  by  Nanteuil. 

Later  the  art  fell  into  the  hands  of  commercial 
engravers,  who  were  not  artists  at  all.  They 
were  patient  plodders.  They  killed  the  art.  And 
nothing  has  been  done  in  steel  engraving,  except 
for  commercial  work,  for  twenty  or  thirty  years. 
The  last  man  who  practiced  it  in  this  country  was 
Alden  Weir.  He  did  one  plate  which  was  really  a 
delightful  and  charming  example  of  metal  engrav- 
ing. Metal  engraving  is  virtually  dead  now,  just 
as  wood  engraving  as  an  art  for  reproducing  is 
dead.  Government  and  bank  note  work  is  engraved 
on  steel,  and,  if  the  designs  were  only  as  artistic 
as  they  are  elaborate,  would  be  amazing;  but  our 
government  has  no  use  for  artists. 

It  was  not  until  after  Diirer  that  the  art  of 
etching  really  came  to  perfection,  and  although 
etching  has  been  practiced  ever  since,  there  are 
only  two  supreme  etchers  who  have  lived  in  this 
world.  One  of  them  was  Rembrandt  and  the  other 
was  James  McNeill  Whistler,  and  the  latter  was  the 
greater  etcher. 

This  print  by  Rembrandt  was  not  only,  at  the 
time  it  was  made,  a  very  extraordinary  etching,  but 


PAGE  137      ALBRECHT  DURER :   THE   CANNON. 
GRAVING;  THE  METHOD  IS  UNCERTAIN 


ETCHING  OR   EN- 


PAGE  141       REMBRANDT:  THE  GOLD  WEIGHER'S  FIELD 


ETCHING  141 

it  still  is,  and  is  an  example  of  another  form  of  art. 
Rembrandt  was  the  first  man  who  found  that  work 
was  picturesque,  and  that  his  father's  mill  and  the 
people  who  lived  in  the  house  by  the  mill  were 
worth  etching.  Before  that  artists  had  never 
condescended  to  tell  any  stones  about  the  life 
around  them  for  their  own  sake;  but  Rembrandt 
was  one  of  the  first  who  did  not  regret  that  the 
houses  and  dykes  of  Holland  were  not  in  Greece, 
and  that  the  Jews  of  the  Amsterdam  ghetto  were  not 
Romans  of  Trastevere  and  wore  togas.  He  found 
that  beauty  was  all  about  him.  He  was  the  first 
artist  to  see  the  picturesqueness  of  Holland. 

Rembrandt  made  a  number — some  twenty  or 
thirty — of  landscape  etchings.  Most  of  them  are 
greatly  praised  for  I  don't  know  what,  except  per- 
haps for  their  being  as  bad  as  anything  that  was 
ever  done  in  landscape.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
made  a  few  of  the  most  perfect  etchings  of  landscape 
that  have  ever  been  made. 

No  artist  since — although  this  was  done  in  fifteen 
hundred  something  or  other — has  ever  surpassed 
that  tiny  plate  of  the  **Gold  Weigher's  Field" 
(Page  140).  It  is  only  a  few  inches  long,  and  yet 
in  that  space  you  have  the  whole  of  the  flat  Dutch 
country,  the  lay  of  the  land,  the  dykes  and  ditches, 
the  great  stretch  of  country  to  the  little  village, 
the  shady  woods  and  away  off  the  line  of  the  sea; 
done  with  the  fewest  of  lines,  and  every  one  of  those 
lines  means  something  and  could  not  be  left  out.  If 
any  of  those  lines  were  left  out  the  plate  would  not 
be  complete.  That  is  the  proof  of  a  great  etching. 
Just  like  the  drawing  of  the  "Mad  Dog"  by  Caldecott, 
where  you  cannot  leave  out  a  line  without  ruining  it, 
so  with  this  etching,  a  single  line  left  out  would  spoil 


142  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  design,  and  a  single  line  added  would  be  one  too 
many.  This  use  of  expressive,  vital,  necessary  line  is 
the  characteristic  of  great  etching  and  great  etchers. 

Rembrandt  made  other  and  quite  different 
landscape  etchings.  This  is  one  I  think  I  can  call 
the  most  notorious,  "The  Three  Trees."  The  trees 
are  rottenly  done,  and  so  is  the  foreground.  The 
bit  of  middle  distance  is  exquisite.  The  composi- 
tion is  wonderfully  arranged;  and  as  for  the  sky, 
that  is  one  of  the  most  amusing  things.  Some 
authorities  on  the  art  of  etching  say  that  rain 
is  coming  on,  and  others  that  it  is  going  off.  You 
can  take  your  choice.  I  say  that  the  clouds  are 
very  beautifully  drawn,  but  what  they  are  doing 
I  don't  know;  I  don't  know  what  the  storm  is 
doing,  whether  it  is  coming  or  going. 

There  is  a  very  curious  thing  about  this  plate, 
and  that  is  those  perpendicularly  ruled  lines  for 
rain.  Now  in  all  Japanese  prints  the  same  lines  are 
used  for  rain,  and  I  wonder  more  and  more  whether 
Rembrandt  gave  the  idea  to  the  Japanese — whether 
some  of  those  Dutch  merchants  who  made  their 
way  out  to  the  East  carried  this  print  and  were  the 
means  of  giving  this  idea  to  the  Japanese — or 
whether  Rembrandt  got  his  idea  from  the  Japanese, 
from  the  prints  which  the  merchants  may  have 
brought  back.  There  they  are,  in  both  Eastern 
and  Western  art.  I  do  not  think  any  of  the  learned 
experts  have  ever  referred  to  this  before.  They 
usually  do  not  refer  to  the  things  that  are  character- 
istic and  worth  referring  to. 

One  of  the  other  amazing  plates  that  Rembrandt 
did  was  the  "Six  Bridge."  This,  we  are  told,  is 
one  of  the  best  of  his  etchings;  it  is  one  of  the  worst. 
I  would  defy  you  to  tell  me  on  which  side  of  that 


ETCHING  143 

canal  those  trees  are  growing,  or  what  kind  of  trees 
they  are,  or  what  is  the  matter  with  that  boat. 
The  bridge  is  not  so  badly  done,  and  there  is  a 
little  bit  of  beautiful  work  in  the  distance;  but  just 
because  an  old  master  did  some  great  plates  is  no 
reason  why  we  should  fall  down  and  worship  all, 
as  all  the  authorities  do  except  myself — I  suppose 
I  am  not  an  authority.  I  am  often  told  I  am  not 
by  those  who  are  not.  But  I  refuse  to  accept  this 
as  good  work. 

There  is  a  story  about  this  plate.  The  story 
is  intended  to  show  the  time  it  takes  to  do  an 
etching  of  this  sort,  or  a  better  one.  I  do  not 
believe  that  Rembrandt  took  any  longer  over  that 
wonderful  "Gold  Weigher's  Field"  than  he  did  to 
make  this  mess — if  he  did  make  it.  He  was  said  to 
have  been  dining  with  his  friend,  the  Burgomaster 
Six,  and  the  bottle  of  schnapps  or  beer  or  mustard 
or  something  had  been  forgotten,  and  it  was  sent  for. 
While  the  servant  was  on  the  way  for  it  Rembrandt 
pulled  a  grounded  plate  out  of  his  pocket  and  pro- 
duced this  masterpiece  on  it.  It  would  have  been 
a  great  deal  better  if  the  story  had  been  carried  on  a 
little  further,  saying  that  he  bit  it,  anyway  that 
they  were  dining  in  the  gutter,  as  the  perspective 
shows,  and  that  he  carried  a  printing  press  around 
with  him  and  printed  it  while  they  waited.  It  is  out 
of  such  nonsense  that  art  history  is  manufactured. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  "Beggars  at  the  Door 
of  a  House"  is  one  of  those  figure  studies  by  Rem- 
brandt as  marvelous  in  design  as  the  "Gold  Weigher's 
Field."  In  this  he  has  rendered  the  beggars  at  the 
door  in  both  a  dramatic  and  a  realistic  fashion.  It 
is  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  Dutch  art,  and  one  of 
the  greatest  etchings  of  the  sort  that  has  ever  been 


144  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

done;  yet  it  i-s  scarce  ranked  above  the  drivel  of 
his  imitating  successors  by  the  authorities. 

The  two  great  etchers  were  Whistler  and  Rem- 
brandt, and  this  I  am  going  to  prove  to  you  by 
putting  these  two  plates  on  the  same  slide.  If 
there  is  one  vital  thing  about  etching,  it  is  that 
the  artist  must  not  try  to  imitate  somebody  else, 
but  be  himself,  and  do  his  work  in  his  own  way,  or 
he  is  not  an  etcher— and  most  artists  are  not,  though 
the  world  is  filled  with  etchers  today.  Still  I  do 
not  think  that  since  Rembrandt  there  have  been  a 
half-dozen  great  ones  added  to  the  list.  Whistler 
was  one,  and  a  greater  than  Rembrandt  in  his  use  of 
vital  meaning  line. 

You  can  see  these  two  plates  were  done  from 
virtually  the  same  spot — at  least  the  artists  were 
seated  on  the  same  spot,  Rembrandt  looking  toward 
Amsterdam,  Whistler  sitting  with  his  back  to 
Rembrandt  etching  the  country  toward  Zaandam 
three  hundred  years  later.  What  I  want  to  point 
out  to  you  is  the  totally  different  way  that  the  two 
men  treat  landscape.  Rembrandt  works  right  up 
to  the  foreground,  and  also  elaborates  the  town  in 
the  distance  in  great  detail.  Whistler  always 
believed  that  the  spectator's  attention  should  be 
concentrated  on  the  important  spot  and  the  rest 
of  the  subject  ignored.  The  windmills  in  his 
subject  are  the  important  things  and  those  are  all 
he  has  drawn,  only  suggesting  that  boat  tied  up  to 
the  edge  of  the  canal.  But  what  those  plates  do 
show,  as  well  as  the  next  one,  is  the  different  way 
in  which  different  artists  work.  Unless  there  is  this 
individuality  in  treatment  there  is  no  art.  Whistler's 
handling  is  far  more  direct  and  simple  than  Rem- 
brandt's;  he  gets  more  with  fewer  lines. 


PAGE  147      REMBRANDT:  THE        WHISTLER:  ANNIE  HADEN 

MOTHER 

ETCHING    PLATES    PLACED    TOGETHER    TO    SHOW    DIFFERENCE 

OF  HANDLING  EMPLOYED  BY  THE  TWO  ARTISTS 


CHRIST    PRESENTED    TO    THE    PEOPLE. 


ETCHING  147 

Here  is  another  comparative  slide  (Page  145). 
This  is  Rembrandt's  amazing  portrait  of  his  mother, 
one  of  the  finest  things  that  was  ever  done  in  etching. 
Alongside  of  it  is  Whistler's  study  of  his  niece,  little 
Annie  Haden.  What  I  want  to  point  out  is  that 
one  man  did  his  work  in  his  way,  and  so  did  the 
other.  There  is  no  attempt  to  imitate.  Both  are 
trying  to  do  the  people  they  saw,  one  his  mother, 
and  one  his  niece,  and  each  made  an  immortal 
portrait  in  his  own  way.  Both  of  these  men  were 
great  draftsmen,  great  craftsmen,  and  that  is  the 
first  necessity  before  you  can  become  a  great  etcher. 
How  many  of  you  students  try  to  do  this?  You  try 
to  copy  your  instructor — or  someone  who  is  the 
fashion  of  the  moment — not  to  study  good  work — • 
and  be  yourselves.  If  you  don't  do  this  you  will  not 
do  anything.     Most  of  you  won't. 

Rembrandt  cared  more  for  color.  Whistler  more 
for  line,  but  etching  is  a  line  process  and  Whistler  is 
the  greater  master  of  line. 

The  "Christ  Presented  to  the  People"  (Page  I46) 
is  a  glorious  plate.  I  know  of  nothing  more  mag- 
nificent in  manufactured  etching  than  this  plate. 
Almost  every  one  of  those  figures  is  an  outline, 
and  yet  every  one  of  those  lines  is  full  of  expression. 
Still  it  is  not  spontaneous  etching.  The  composi- 
tion is  perfectly  arranged,  and  so  is  the  drawing  and 
the  biting;  and  to  bite  a  large  plate  of  that  sort, 
as  Rembrandt  has  done,  is  an  amazingly  difficult 
thing.  He  carried  this  plate  on  through  several 
states.  He  did  not  bother  his  head,  or  trouble  him- 
self at  all,  nor  did  any  of  his  contemporaries,  about 
local  color  and  costume.  Instead  of  the  building 
being  in  Jerusalem,  it  is  a  building  probably  in 
Amsterdam;    and  the  people,  many  of  them  Jews, 


148  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

are  dressed  in  the  clothes  they  wore  in  the  ghetto 
of  Amsterdam.  Few  artists  at  that  time,  when 
they  went  in  for  historical  compositon,  cared  any- 
thing about  local  color  or  historical  accuracy. 
What  they  cared  about  was  to  do  their  work  as 
well  as  they  could,  building  it  up  from  the  material 
they  had;  and  Rembrandt  did  this  supremely  well. 
Still  the  highest  form  of  etching  is  sketching — ahd 
not  making  potboilers. 

Here  is  another,  "The  Three  Crosses."  In  this 
plate  there  is  more  attempt  at  costume.  This  is 
one  of  Rembrandt's  most  magnificent  plates  which 
are  compositions,  religious  prints  made  for  dealers — - 
made  to  sell.  Whistler  said  that  "the  big  plate  is 
an  offense."  He  never  intended,  I  know,  to  refer 
in  that  statement  to  Rembrandt,  because  he  admired 
Rembrandt  enormously;  he  only  referred  to  the 
large  machines  with  which,  if  you  walk  down  Michi- 
gan Avenue,  you  can  see  that  all  the  large  shops  are 
decorated,  plain  or  in  colors.  And  that  kind  of  work  is 
rotten  work;  therefore  it  is  popular,  and  the  kind  of 
thing  some  of  you  would  like  to  do — because  it  pays. 

But  the  sort  of  thing  that  Rembrandt  did,  like 
"The  Three  Crosses,"  "The  Raising  of  Lazarus" 
(if  he  did  it),  and  a  number  of  other  plates,  were 
religious  prints  which  were  published  and  sold  just 
as  sporting  prints  are  sold  today;  only  then  religion 
rather  than  golf  was  believed  in  and  practiced. 
There  is  no  one  among  us  today  who  amounts  to 
anything  who  is  doing  anything  in  the  way  of  reli- 
gious art;  but,  as  I  say,  religion  was  then  a  popular 
subject,  and  these  prints  were  religious  propaganda 
and  were  perfect  examples  of  what  could  be  done  by 
etching.  Yet  they  are  not  spontaneous,  but  built 
up  with  the  greatest  thought,  care,  and  elaboration. 


ETCHING  149 

I  want  you  to  understand  that  "The  Gold 
Weigher's  Field"  and  "The  Mother"  are  vital  spon- 
taneous expressions  and  "The  Three  Crosses" 
an  elaborate  composition,  carried  out  by  Rembrandt 
perfectly,  but  to  a  degree  that  is  not  the  real  aim 
of  etching.  Its  aim  is  doing  as  Van  Dyck  did  in  this 
portrait  (Page  151)  quite  personally.  Here  you  see 
every  line  and  dot  has  been  done  by  the  etcher  with 
a  meaning.  There  is  not  a  superfluous  stroke  about 
it,  that  is,  as  far  as  Van  Dyck  carried  it.  After 
the  plate  was  taken  up  by  professional  etchers  and 
engravers  who  put  in  costume  and  background  and 
carried  the  composition  down  to  the  title  at  the 
bottom,  they  finished  it,  and  finished  it  in  every  way 
as  an  etching. 

Another  man  who  also  practiced  etching  very 
extensively  a  little  later  was  Callot,  and  in  his 
"Horrors  of  War"  he  too  was  a  preacher  and 
propagandist;  he  mader  a  series  of  remarkable 
plates.  They  are  upstairs  in  the  print  room,  and  you 
should  look  at  them  and  study  them.  His  work  is 
much  more  direct  and  simple  than  Rembrandt's, 
Callot  was  a  most  prolific  person.  He  published 
many  plates  besides  these  "Horrors  of  War," 
and  they  have  come  down  to  us  as  a  notable 
example  of  contemporary  facts.  What  have  we  of 
the  horrors  of  the  World  War  in  etching?  The 
printing  of  Callot's  plates  is  poor  because  he  seems 
to  have  published  them  very  cheaply.  Probably 
he  did  not  do  the  printing  himself.  Then  there 
was  Hollar  too  who  preserved  much  the  Puritans 
destroyed  in  architecture  and  costume.  Who  is 
really  doing  anything  to  preserve  our  customs 
destroyed  by  hypocrites,  prohibitionists,  and  busi- 
ness men? 


150  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Another  man  who  Hved  a  Httle  later  in  England 
is  Hogarth.  This  plate  is  finished  with  the  graver. 
Hogarth  began  his  plates,  which  he  carried  on  during 
all  his  life,  nearly  always  as  etchings.  But  they 
were  all  finished  by  himself  and  his  pupils  with  the 
graver.  He  probably  etched  the  subjects  first,  as 
Van  Dyck  did,  his  pupils  and  assistants  finishing  the 
published  plates. 

I  want  to  show  you  just  for  a  minute — though  we 
are  going  to  have  a  press  here,  on  Thursday,  I  hope,  and 
try  to  do  some  work — how  the  men  in  the  past  made 
etchings.  These  plates  (Pages  135,  151,  and  152) 
were  taken  from  Abraham  Bosse's  Book  on  Etching. 
You  see  the  etcher  biting  his  plate  which  has  been 
grounded,  and  drawn  upon;  and  acid  pouring  over 
it  runs  down  it  and  into  the  trough  below — just  as 
the  photo-engraver  works  today.  The  other  man  is 
drawing  under  a  screen.  The  screen  is  used  in  order 
to  diffuse  the  light  and  let  him  see  the  lines  in  the 
copper  plate.  This  youngster  is  heating  something, 
probably  making  etching  ground.  There  is  a  man 
biting  a  plate,  at  the  back  of  the  print,  just  as  we 
do  today.  These  plates  from  Bosse  show  us  more  of 
technical  methods  than  any  number  of  descriptions. 
In  the  old  days,  instead  of  using  a  bath  as  we  do 
now,  a  border  of  wax  was  put  around  the  edges  of 
the  plate  after  the  drawing  was  made  on  it,  and 
this  wax  border  retained  the  acid  which  was  poured 
on  the  plate.  It  was  a  delightful  method,  I  know, 
because  I  have  tried  it  once  or  twice  myself, 
and  the  beauty  of  it  is  that  the  acid  leaked  out 
under  the  wax,  and  it  got  on  your  clothes,  and 
burned  your  fingers;  nevertheless  here  in  these 
prints  is  the  proof  of  the  way  the  old  men  bit  their 
plates. 


PAGE   150       A.  BOSSE:    ETCHERS  AT  WORK.       ETCHING 


PAGE    149      A.    VAN    DYCK:     FRANCISCUS    SNYDERS 
ETCHING 


PAGE     150       A.    BOSSE:     THH     PRINTER     AT     WORK.       ETCHING. 
FROM    AN    OLD    PRINT 


ETCHING  153 

This  man  is  smoking  the  plate.  The  plate  has 
been  grounded,  the  varnish  put  on  it.  I  will  show 
you  how  it  is  done  on  Thursday.  I  don't  know 
how  they  did  it;  probably  they  dabbed  the  varnish 
on.  The  plate  is  hung  up,  or  it  was  in  those  days — 
we  don't  do  it  now — and  a  lighted  taper  was  placed 
underneath  it,  and  the  lighted  taper  smoked  the 
plate  and  turned  it  a  beautiful  black,  and  that  was 
done  in  order  that  they  might  see  the  lines  in  the 
glittering  copper  through  the  black  surface. 

Here  is  a  man  heating  the  plate  exactly  as  it  is 
done  today.  What  makes  these  old  prints  so  very 
interesting  is  that  you  learn  how  the  work  was  done, 
although  many  of  the  methods  have  been  abandoned. 

Here  is  a  printer  at  work,  at  the  press.  This 
shows  the  sort  of  printing  press  which  was  used 
three  or  four  hundred  years  ago.  It  was  all  made 
of  wood.  Now  they  are  all  made  of  metal,  as  you 
will  see  on  Thursday.  The  plate  is  put  on  the  bed  of 
the  press;  you  can  see  the  edge  of  it.  The  dampened 
paper  is  laid  on  it.  Then  this  plank  of  wood  covered 
with  blankets  is  pulled  through,  under  great  pressure 
between  the  rollers,  the  man  with  all  his  might 
pulling  that  plank  through  from  one  side  of  the  press 
to  the  other,  and  when  that  is  done  the  ink  has  come 
out  of  the  lines  on  to  the  paper.  This  he  Hfts  up,  and 
the  print  is  on  it.  Up  at  the  top  the  prints  are 
being  dried.  Apparently  the  old  printers  did  not 
use  blankets.  They  used  an  upper  plank  instead. 
These  are  prints  hung  up  to  dry — that  is  no  longer 
done.  This  is  a  very  interesting  plate,  because  it 
shows  the  form  of  press  on  which  Diirer  and  Rem- 
brandt probably  printed  their  proofs. 

This  form  of  press  was  used  in  Venice,  and  almost 
a  similar  one  was  used  by  Diirer  when  he  made  his 


154  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

visit  there,  and  certainly  by  numbers  of  the  old 
Italian  engravers,  and  certainly  also  by  Whistler 
and  Duveneck.  I  worked  on  it  myself.  The 
performance  of  that  press  was  magnificent.  The  bed 
used  to  move  about  halfway,  and  then  it  dropped 
about  a  half  an  inch,  and  if  you  didn't  get  out  of 
the  way  quickly  enough  you  got  the  bed  on  your  toes. 

Another  etcher  of  the  eighteenth  century  was 
Piranese,  Although  most  of  his  prints  were  fin- 
ished with  the  graver,  still  in  a  series  of  etchings  of 
"The  Prisons  of  Rome"  he  made  a  set  of  designs, 
very  unrealistic,  but  very  dramatic,  arid  justly 
regarded  as  of  great  importance  today. 

Chodowiecki,  a  Pole,  was  another  workman  who 
illustrated  a  vast  number  of  French  books  during  the 
eighteenth  century,  with  a  great  deal  of  grace  and 
the  greatest  perfection  of  craftsmanship. 

And  then  came  Thomas  Rowlandson  (Page  155). 
He  etched  his  designs.  You  can  see  the  lines  through 
the  tint  upon  them.  Those  lines  were  first  etched, 
and  then  on  the  top  of  them  a  ground  called  aquatint 
was  placed,  which  gives  a  tone  to  the  whole  plate, 
and  adds  richness  in  printing.  Aquatint  was  put  on 
because  the  etcher  wanted  a  tone  on  his  plate  and 
could  not  trust  the  printer  to  get  it.  Goya  also  made 
many  aquatints  (Page  156).  His  design  is  better 
than  his  technique.  In  the  early  part  of  the  last 
century  many  very  fine  designs  were  made  in  aqua- 
tint. The  art  is  to  a  certain  extent  lost  today,  but 
it  is  being  revived. 

I  showed  you  some  of  Blake's  wood  blocks  last 
week.  Here  is  one  of  his  etchings  from  the  Book  of 
Joby  one  of  the  most  impressive  things  ever  done  in 
art.  And  this  design  is  pure  etching.  I  am  told  it 
is  engraved.     But  on  the  outside  of  the  design  he 


PAGE  154      T.  ROWLANDSON:   THE  SOFA.      AQUATINT 


PAGE  158 
THE  WYE. 


J.  M.  W.  TURNER:   THE  JUNCTION  OF  THE  SEVERN  ANO 
FROM  "LIBER  STUDIORUM" 


PAGE    154       F.   GOYA:     THE 
AQUATINT  AND  LINES 


WITCHES.      FROM   "THE   CAPRICES. 


ETCHING  157 

drew  a  border,  in  some  sort  of  acid-resisting  varnish, 
and  then  when  he  got  his  design  drawn  through  the 
varnish,  and  this  part  drawn  with  Hquid  acid- 
resisting  varnish,  he  put  the  whole  plate  in  the  acid 
bath  and  bit  the  two  parts  together,  one  in  intaglio, 
the  other  in  relief,  and  both  printed  on  the  same 
press — at  the  same  time.  It  was  a  very  interesting 
and  very  successful  method,  and  certain  artists  have 
resurrected  it. 

No  one,  I  think,  has  used  lines  in  a  more  effective 
way  than  Blake.  After  this  was  done  nearly  all 
of  these  designs  were  colored  by  hand.  When  they 
were  being  made  Blake  could  scarcely  sell  them,  but 
now  they  are  the  treasures  and  the  prizes  of  all 
collectors  who  can  obtain  them.  Cotman  did  much 
in  etching  of  various  sorts.  Here  is  one  in  soft 
ground.  I  will  show  you  how  it  is  done  later.  It  is 
a  charming  method  of  work,  and  one  which  was 
practiced  with  the  greatest  success  by  the  early 
English  engravers. 

David  Lucas  and  other  Englishmen  reproduced 
many  artists'  work  in  mezzotint.  The  whole  of  the 
plate  is  covered  with  a  roughened  surface,  which 
is  obtained  by  taking  a  tool,  the  face  of  which  is 
covered  with  a  multitude  of  small  teeth,  and  rocking 
it  violently  forward  and  backward  in  twenty  or 
thirty  directions,  and  this  roughened  plate  of  copper 
or  steel  is  rocked  until  it  will  hold  the  ink,  as  a  solid 
black  mass,  which  is  dabbed  or  rolled  on  it. 

When  the  rocking  has  been  done,  the  engraver 
or  artist — very  few  artists  have  tried  it  because 
although  it  looks  very  easy  it  is  a  very  tedious 
process — with  a  scraper  and  a  burnisher  draws  the 
whole  design  by  scraping  and  burnishing  in  the 
roughened  surface;  the  design  is  made  entirely  by 


158  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

scraping  down  the  ridges  and  humps  and  roughnesses 
that  cover  the  face  of  the  plate;  and  finally  when  it 
is  scraped  down  the  design  is  done,  thus  leaving 
more  or  less  of  the  roughened  surface  which  holds 
the  ink  placed  on  it.     This  is  mezzotint. 

Turner  for  his  Liber  Studiorum  (Page  155)  did  the 
etching  for  many  of  the  plates  himself;  a  few  of  them 
he  also  scraped.  Here  is  an  etching  by  him  which 
shows  the  first  stage  (Page  159)-  Look  how  every 
line  means  something.  It  shows  that  he  was  a 
great  etcher,  because  he  drew  lines  which  have 
meaning.  The  etching  was  a  guide  for  the  mezzo- 
tinter.  Through  the  roughened  surface  he  could  see 
Turner's  lines,  and  with  the  etched  lines  as  a  guide 
he  scraped  the  subject  out. 

This  is  the  finished  plate.  You  can  see  in  various 
places  in  the  tree  trunks,  and  in  the  distance,  where 
the  etched  line  has  been  used,  and  you  can  see  in 
the  extreme  dark  where  the  roughened  ground  has 
been  left  untouched.  That  is  what  the  French  call 
the  maniere  noire^  the  black  method,  the  manner 
of  drawing  with  the  scraper  from  dark  to  light. 

One  man  who  has  to  come  in  as  an  etcher, 
although  we  may  not  think  it,  is  John  Ruskin. 
Think  what  you  will  of  Ruskin  as  a  writer,  and  I 
must  say  that  I  think  of  him  with  very  mingled 
feelings,  except  as  a  master  of  beautiful  English — 
there  is  no  question  that  John  Ruskin  was  an 
artist,  a  man  who,  if  he  had  not  written,  would  live 
by  his  art.  This  is  being  recognized.  In  this 
plate  is  great  feeling  for  form  expressed  by  simple 
line  in  the  drawing  of  that  sheer  cliff.  It  is  a 
masterpiece.  And  the  British  are  for  the  first  time 
honoring  Ruskin,  because  this  winter  there  was, 
in    the   Royal   Academy,  a   show  of  his  work  which 


IS&fJ  J    't^ 


PAGE   158       J.  M.  W.  TURNER:    ST.  CATHERINE'S    HILL.       ETCHING 
FOR  MEZZOTINT  TO  SHOW  THE  WORK 


PAGE  158      J.  M.  W.  TURNER:     ST.    CATHERINE'S    HILL.      MEZZO- 
TINT 


PAGE   161       C.  MERYON:  THE  COLLEGE  HENRI  QUATRE.       ETCHING 


PAGE    165       F.   SEYMOUR  HADEN:    SUNSET  IN  IRELAND.       DRY  POINT 


ETCHING  161 

produced  a  profound  sensation  on  people  who  did 
not  know  he  could  draw.  He  was  a  very  master  of 
drawing.  There  is  one  thing  these  plates  prove, 
and  that  is  that  one  must  be  a  master  of  drawing,  and 
draw  better  than  anyone  else  if  one  wants  to  be  an 
etcher.  Don't  worry  about  drawing — if  you  cannot 
draw  you  cannot  etch,  and  if  you  cannot  draw  you 
cannot  do  anything;  yet  an  etcher  must  know  how 
to  bite  and  print  his  plates. 

Another  man  who  was  a  great  etcher,  and  is  now 
a  great  success,  was  Meryon  (Page  i6o).  He  did 
many  plates  of  old  Paris  in  remarkable  fashion. 
But  he  was  in  modern  times,  as  Rembrandt  had 
been  before  him,  a  commercial  proposition,  not  for 
himself,  though  Rembrandt  was,  but  for  people  who 
exploited  his  works. 

This  plate,  "The  Stryge,"  is  very  popular;  it  is 
almost  sacred.  It  has  been  a  great  commercial 
success,  and  so  has  a  great  financial  value.  It  has  no 
value  excepting  that;  it  gives  no  idea  of  old  Paris — 
there  isn't  any  idea  in  it  at  all.  But  it  is  regarded 
as  something  holy,  yet  there  is  no  merit  about  it, 
nothing  really  of  any  value,  except  the  drawing  of 
that  crouching  figure.  In  "The  Stryge,"  the  height 
above  the  city  is  not  given,  the  houses  are  not  well 
drawn,  the  church  tower  is  pathetic.  There  is  every- 
thing which  is  bad  about  it;  and  to  crown  all  Meryon 
imitated  Rembrandt's  trick  of  putting  an  oval  on  a 
square-edged  plate.  Meryon  had  little  idea  of  art 
and  less  of  decoration.  He  said  he  was  no  etcher, 
and  he  told  the  truth  about  himself  in  this  plate. 

But  every  once  in  a  while  Meryon  did  a  marvelous 
plate.  "The  Morgue"  is  one  of  the  greatest  of  his 
designs.  This  is  quite  another  story.  Though  much 
of  its  fame  depends  on  the  story  at  the  bottom. 


162  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

"The  College  Henri  Quatre"  (Page  i6o),  however, 
is  certainly  the  most  wonderful  study  of  a  great  city 
etched  by  an  artist.  The  way  in  which  he  has  got 
the  feeling  of  Paris,  receding  into  the  distance, 
street  beyond  street,  and  house  beyond  house,  is 
something  that  no  one  before  had  ever  done,  not 
even  Diirer,  and  no  one  since  has  ever  attempted 
or  probably  ever  will  succeed  in  doing.  Yet  it  is 
no  portrait  of  Paris — but  it  is  Paris — all  through  it 
there  is  that  curious  thing  about  him,  that  spirit  of 
madness.  And  in  some  of  the  early  states  the  town 
is  about  half  drawn,  and  in  the  distance  are  cliffs 
and  mountains  and  farther  away  is  the  sea,  and 
any  number  of  strange  creatures  are  in  it,  proving 
that  he,  when  he  was  doing  his  most  wonderful 
work,  was  insane.  Yet  there  is  nothing  in  the  whole 
of  etching  to  touch  the  distance  he  put  in  the  city. 
And  although  Hamerton  said  that  this  was  all  done 
from  nature,  the  mere  fact  that  he  had  in  one  state 
a  background  of  sea  proves  how  little  Hamerton 
knew  what  he  was  talking  about  on  that  occasion. 
Meryon's  "San  Francisco"  is  another  of  his  incred- 
ible views  of  cities,  and  no  one  knows  whether  he 
ever  saw  San  Francisco. 

This  is  a  form  of  etching  that  was  greatly  prac- 
ticed in  England — an  illustration  from  Pickwick. 
It  doesn't  matter  who  made  it.  It  might  have  been 
made  by  Cruikshank,  or  by  any  one  of  a  number  of 
others;  it  was  done  by  Seymour.  But  that  is  the 
kind  of  thing  that  your  grandfathers  were  brought 
up  on,  the  few  of  them  that  came  from  England,  and 
that  is  the  sort  of  thing  that  was  taken  seriously. 
That  England  ever  survived  it  is  something  I  cannot 
understand,  but  everybody  took  that  sort  of  stuff 
seriously,   instead   of  Hogarth.     How   the   country 


PAGE  165       F.  SEYMOUR  HADEN:    KILGAREN  CASTLE.      ETCHING 


V 

6    lABOkUM 

'■■''\- 

OULCE.    LENIMEN 

Ife^tt"^ 

j^^^^SMSi.', 

BP^iSi^     J 

Y^t^m 

^^^^^^^^»i^^pi 

W§mSKt^^^-. 

iSHP^f-^ 

,M\m  •'V^VS'       ^^-^             ^ 

PAGE    166      F.  SEYMOUR   HADEN:     HANDS   ETCHING.      ETCHING 


PAGE   167       F.  DUVENECK:   THE  RIALTO.       ETCHING 


PAGE  169      J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:  BLACK  LION  WHARF.      ETCHING 


ETCHING  165 

came  to  degenerate  to  this  extent  I  do  not  know. 
That  thing  is  pretty  nearly  as  bad  as  the  comics 
we  love — no,  not  so  bad  by  any  means. 

But  England  got  over  this  attack  and  produced  a 
fine  etcher  in  Seymour  Haden  (Page  i6o),  and  here 
is  one  of  his  dry  points  which  I  think  is  one  of  the 
most  beautiful  renderings  of  landscape  that  was  ever 
made.  Dry  point,  I  might  explain  to  you,  is  not 
bitten  line.  The  design  is  drawn  entirely  with  a 
very  heavy  and  very  sharp  steel  point;  there  is  no 
biting;  it  is  pure  drawing,  with  the  point.  In  order 
to  get  fine  lines,  those  delicate  ones  in  the  sky,  and 
those  in  the  foreground,  the  point  is  held  almost 
vertical.  And  if  you  want  to  get  that  richness  you 
see  in  the  foreground  you  have  to  go  over  the  lines 
several  times  with  great  force,  digging  into  the 
copper.  But  by  holding  the  point  at  an  oblique 
angle  you  make  a  furrow  as  a  plow  does,  throwing 
up  the  copper  on  one  side;  the  more  obliquely  you 
hold  the  point  the  more  you  throw  up  the  metal— 
and  it  takes  a  certain  amount  of  muscle  to  do 
that — the  more  the  metal  is  thrown  up  the  more  ink 
sticks  to  it,  and  that  is  what  gives  the  richness.  In 
steel  and  copper  engravings  either  that  ridge  of 
metal  is  cut  off,  or  the  graver  itself  cuts  it  off;  but 
in  dry  point  it  is  left  and  called  burr,  and  every- 
thing is  done  to  increase  its  richness  and  depth.  I 
know  of  no  landscape  which  is  more  beautiful  or 
richer,  and  which  gives  a  greater  effect  of  a  deep, 
dense  wood  than  "The  Sunset  in  Ireland"  by 
Haden. 

Here  is  one  of  his  etched  studies  (Page  163). 
This  was  done  from  nature.  All  that  I  am  going 
to  show  you  were.  It  is  a  study  of  one  of  the 
Welsh  castles,  in  which  every  line  means  something, 


166  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

as  Rembrandt's  lines  mostly  did.  This  is  one  of 
Haden's  smallest  and  one  of  his  best  plates.  Haden 
was  a  worshiper  of  Rembrandt,  but  in  his  best 
plates  he  was  himself. 

Here  is  another,  "The  Breaking  Up  of  the 
Agamemnon,"  a  composition  which  he  made,  he 
said  himself,  when  on  his  way  to  a  dinner  at  Green- 
wich. He  was  all  dressed  up  in  his  evening  clothes 
and  going  down  to  dinner  on  a  steamboat,  when 
he  happened  to  see  this  great  composition,  and  he 
got  off  the  boat,  pulled  the  copper  plate  out  of  his 
coat-tail  pocket,  did  the  etching,  and  lost  his  dinner. 
I  happened  to  be  lunching  in  his  house  when  he  told 
this  story,  and  another  Scammon  lecturer,  Mr. 
Hopkinson  Smith,  was  also  there,  and  when  Haden 
told  the  story  Smith  said  to  him,  "If  you  can  carry 
a  copper  plate  large  enough  to  do  that  on  in  the 
pocket  of  your  evening  clothes,  what  sized  copper 
plates  do  you  carry  along  in  your  ordinary  clothes' 
pockets  ?" 

I  don't  believe  Haden's  story.  I  don't  believe 
the  plate  was  done  from  nature — that  upsets  my 
theory — not  at  all;  it  looks  as  though  it  was — 
Rembrandt's  does  not.  Haden's  line  means  some- 
thing— Rembrandt's  does  not.  This  plate  shows  how 
Haden  held  his  point.  He  worked  with  this  huge 
instrument  which  I  wouldn't  want  to  have  anything 
to  do  with;  and  those  are  the  gravers  and  dry 
points  which  he  used.  But  the  etching  is  really 
a  fine  thing  as  well  as  a  valuable  record  of  the 
way  he  worked.  It  is  the  title-page  of  a  collection 
of  proofs  of  his  etchings  published  in  Paris  about 
i860. 

Now  I  want  to  talk  to  you  about  the  plate. 
It  is  fine  because  each  line  means  something.     Look 


ETCHING  167 

at  the  stunning  way  in  which  he  has  drawn  the 
movement  of  the  Thames  water.  And  those  of 
you  who  know  the  Thames  know  how  well  it  has  been 
done,  how  perfectly  it  has  been  expressed.  There 
is  no  tone  on  the  drawing  of  that  old  hulk  against 
the  light;  it  is  all  in  outline,  just  as  Whistler  did  in 
those  Blue  and  White  Porcelain  Pots  that  I  showed 
you  the  other  day.  And  look  at  the  color  of  the 
setting  sun.  You  feel  the  color  of  the  sunset,  you 
feel  the  whole  thing,  yet  it  is  all  in  line;  but  each  line 
means  something  and  is  drawn  with  meaning  and 
bitten  with  skill.  If  you  do  not  feel  it,  you  will  never 
be  able  to  understand  etching.     Most  of  you  won't. 

Another  man  who  followed  Haden  and  preceded 
Whistler  in  Venice  was  Duveneck  (Page  164),  and 
he  made  in  the  seventies  a  series  of  plates  of  Venice, 
and  also  some  in  Florence.  At  the  time  these  etch- 
ings were  stupidly  or  maliciously  supposed  by  people 
who  ought  to  know  better — and  one  was  Seymour 
Haden — to  have  been  done  by  Whistler,  who  had 
been  sent  to  Venice  to  etch  the  city. 

This  was  an  entirely  new  view  of  Venice,  and  all 
of  the  plates  made  by  Duveneck  in  Venice  were 
new  in  viewpoint  and  handling,  and  you  should 
study  them  all.  Some  of  them  are  upstairs,  and  a 
complete  collection  is  in  the  Cincinnati  Museum. 
He  is  one  of  the  least  known  of  our  artists  in  America 
today,  but  he  will  live  in  the  future  when  some  of 
our  high-priced  geniuses  are  forgotten. 

And  now  I  come  to  the  biggest  man  of  all.  And 
whether  you  like  it  or  not  it  is  a  fact.  And  that  man 
was  James  A.  McNeill  Whistler.  He  was  trained,  and 
trained  thoroughly  and  carefully  and  accurately, 
and  he  was  trained  in  the  best  schools  that  we  have 
in    the   United   States   of  America   as   art   schools; 


168  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

one  was  West  Point,  the  other  the  Coast  Survey. 
He  learned  to  draw  at  West  Point,  to  etch  in  the 
Coast  Survey.  And  while  he  was  at  Washington 
he  drew  the  coast  line  and  profile  of  a  map,  but 
wanted  to  see  what  would  happen  if  he  drew  and 
bit  certain  faces  and  figures  on  the  copper.  He 
found  out,  and  he  also  found  out  that  he  was  not 
to  waste  government  copper,  and  in  order  to  make 
sure  that  he  wouldn't  waste  any  of  it  in  the  future 
they  sacked  him.  But  he  remembered  what  he  had 
learned,  and  he  went  over  to  Paris,  and  produced  in 
a  short  time,  with  the  knowledge  he  had  gained, 
a  number  of  fine  plates  in  Alsace  and  Paris,  when 
he  was  about  twenty  years  of  age.  These  are  "The 
French  Set." 

If  you  remember,  and  keep  it  in  your  head, 
Rembrandt's  "Mill,"  here  you  will  see  is  a  some- 
what similar  subject,  and  yet  there  is  far  more  go, 
far  more  life,  and  far  more  color  in  that  than  Rem- 
brandt ever  got.  In  this  he  went  far  beyond  the 
Dutchman,  and  so  he  did  in  a  number  of  the  other 
early  etchings  of  "The  French  Set." 

This  is  a  curious  one,  "Street  in  Saverne,"  because 
it  shows  that  from  his  earliest  years  Whistler  loved 
the  beauty  of  the  night,  and  began  by  trying  to 
etch  it.  And  yet  that  is  done  in  a  very  simple 
fashion.  Some  of  the  lines  are  meaningless,  some 
are  scribbled  and  some  of  them  are  very  mechanical, 
but  he  got  what  he  wanted,  and  he  rapidly  learned 
how  to  etch  with  the  fewest,  the  most  expressive  lines. 

This  study  of  a  wine  glass  is  done  frankly  and 
purely  in  rivalry  of  Rembrandt's  "Shell."  Both 
are  examples  of  splendid  technique. 

One  of  the  most  exquisite  of  his  early  prints  is 
only  the  study  of  a  small  boy,  the  son  of  his  landlord 


ETCHING  169 

in  Paris.  It  shows  perfectly  what  I  have  been 
trying  to  tell  you;  every  one  of  those  exquisitely 
drawn  lines  means  something.  There  is  a  body 
inside  of  that  little  blouse,  and  how  wonderfully 
the  hair  is  drawn,  the  turned-up  nose,  the  little 
hand,  and  the  bit  of  sofa  on  which  the  boy  is  sitting, 
and  the  whole  thing  is  done  with  the  fewest  of  lines, 
and  lines  which  express  everything — if  you  cannot 
see  this  it  is  useless  to  look  at  etchings. 

Here  is  another  study  of  his  niece  (Page  172), 
whom  I  showed  you  in  that  slide  in  comparison 
with  Rembrandt,  known  as  "Annie  Haden  in  the 
Big  Hat."  I  think  it  is  about  a  foot  high,  and  it 
enlarges  to  the  size  of  one  of  his  full-length  por- 
traits, and  is  just  as  stunning  as  they  are.  He 
really  felt,  and  all  these  men  whose  work  I  have 
shown  cared  as  much  about  their  etchings  as  they 
cared  for  their  illustrations,  or  for  their  paintings, 
or  any  other  form  of  art.  It  is  in  dry  point,  the 
greater  part  of  it.  See  the  wonderful  way  in  which 
he  has  rendered  that  i860  costume,  and  that  hat 
which  is  supposed  to  be  so  ugly  is  really  a  triumph 
of  art. 

After  leaving  Paris  and  coming  over  to  England 
in  the  late  50's  and  early  6o's  he  did  a  series  of  plates 
of  the  lower  Thames,  and  this  "Black  Lion  Wharf"  is 
one  of  them  (Page  164).  If  you  will  look  carefully 
you  will  see  that  the  etching  of  each  of  those  houses 
shows  the  material  of  which  it  is  built,  and  the 
different  times  at  which  the  different  houses  were 
built.  The  wood  and  the  brick  and  the  stone  and 
the  whitewash  are  all  there.  There  is  color,  yet 
all  is  in  line.  And  the  barges  are  perfectly  done. 
Look  at  the  drawing  of  the  details,  and  the  various 
mooring   arrangements   on   the   side  of  this   barge. 


170  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

done  with  the  greatest  simplicity,  and  yet  every 
single  line  tells,  as  every  single  line  does  in  that 
longshoreman  who  is  sitting  in  the  barge. 

That  is  one  of  the  great  triumphs  of  Whistler's 
early  life.  He  said  he  did  not  like  it,  but  I  do  not 
agree  with  him. 

He  told  me  that  it  was  all  done  out  of  doors,  and 
the  drawing  of  the  background  took  him  three 
weeks.  He  never  did  anything  except  from  nature. 
He  never  was  able  to  work  except  when  he  was 
working  from  nature,  or  a  model. 

Jo  was  his  model  for  the  various  "White  Girls," 
the  little  and  the  large  ones.  And  she  had  evidently 
been  posing  for  him,  and  this  day  she  was  tired  out. 
For  though  he  was  the  most  kindly  and  gracious  of 
men,  and  most  considerate  to  women,  save  when 
they  were  posing,  he  thought  then  of  nothing  but 
his  work.  And  Jo,  evidently  tired  out  after  an 
hour  or  so  of  standing,  threw  herself  in  a  chair,  and 
there  she  rested.  But  he  never  stopped;  he  found 
a  plate  and  made  his  dry  point  of  her.  Every 
change  was  a  new  subject  for  him,  and  this  print 
of  Jo,  "Weary,"  is  the  most  exquisite  portrait  that 
was  ever  done  in  dry  point  in  this  world  (Page  171). 
Everybody  is  beginning  now  to  believe  me  about 
this,  and  it  is  the  truth.  You  can  find  nothing  to 
touch  this  plate  for  sheer  beauty  by  any  artist 
in  any  age. 

Whistler  went,  after  various  experiences,  to  Venice, 
and  if  you  can  remember  that  plate  by  Duveneck 
you  can  see  how  differently  the  two  men  treated 
the  same  subject.  Yet  at  the  time  they  both 
lived  very  close  together  in  the  same  city  and 
in  the  same  part  of  it — and  they  both  etched 
the  Riva,  but  how  differently!     If  I  could  have  the 


PAGE  170      J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:     WEARY,      DRY  POINT 


PAGE  169      J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:    ANNIE  HADEN  IN  THE  BIG  HAT. 
ETCHED  AND  DRY  POINT  LINE 


ETCHING  173 

two  artists'  plates  and  put  them  together,  you 
would  see  how  utterly  different  the  two  men's  tech- 
nique was  even  when  treating  the  same  subjects. 
Look  at  the  work  he  has  put  in  this  Riva,  the  figures, 
the  architecture,  the  gondolas.  It  takes  a  mighty 
lot  of  drawing  to  do  a  thing  like  that,  but  there  is  a 
mighty  lot  more  left  out  No  one  in  modern  times 
could  do  it  as  well.  Probably  that  is  one  reason 
why  some  of  you  don't  want  to  draw — it  is  rather 
difficult  to  draw — yet  without  drawing  you  can  do 
nothing — not  even  paint. 

Here  is  another  exquisite  Venetian  study  made  on 
one  of  the  tiny  canals.  And  there  is  one  thing  about 
it  that  those  of  you  who  have  studied  and  know 
something  about  composition — which  is  another 
valuable  thing  you  will  have  to  learn  some  day — 
will  see  in  this  plate,  and  that  is  just  exactly  what 
John  Ruskin  preached  all  through  his  Elements 
of  Drawingy  another  valuable  book  that  you  ought 
to  read,  for  it  will  give  you  some  new  ideas,  and 
that  is,  the  way  in  which  the  lines  of  the  design  of 
"The  Bridge"  lead  right  straight  up  to  what  Whistler 
considered  the  most  important  thing  in  the  compo- 
sition, the  distant  group  of  trees,  and  one  line  leads 
right  up  one  side,  the  other  up  the  other  side,  in  the 
same  way.  Did  you  ever  think  how  valuable  lines 
are  to  convey  meaning  and  arrangement.^  That  is 
marvelous  composition,  because  it  is  not  obvious, 
it  doesn't  hit  you  in  the  face,  but  there  it  is.  It  is 
all  thought  out,  and  every  one  of  those  lines  in  that 
plate  is  thought  out  and  thought  about  before 
it  is  even  put  on  the  plate.  That  is  what  Whistler 
meant  by  saying  an  artist's  work  is  "finished 
from  the  beginning,"  not  what  fools  thought  he 
meant. 


174  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

And  there  was  another  curious  thing  about  his 
work,  the  drawing  of  it.  He  always  said  that  he 
began  with  the  most  important  part.  Probably 
he  began  in  this  plate  with  the  bridge,  and  drew  it 
in  completely,  and  then  filled  in  the  rest  of  the  design 
as  he  wanted  it,  but  he  got  the  bridge  right,  for  in 
etching  you  cannot  add  to  your  plates  as  you  can 
to  paper  or  canvas;  you  must  place  things  right. 
He  always  called  it  the  Japanese  method  of  draw- 
ing. I  don't  know  where  he  got  the  idea,  or 
whether  the  Japanese  had  any  such  idea,  but  he 
always  said  he  believed  it  was  the  way  they  worked. 
If  you  asked  a  Jap  he  would  tell  you  it  was  so — 
but  whether  Hiroshige  worked  that  way  he  would 
not  know. 

Whistler  said  he  couldn't  draw  architecture. 
I  don't  know  who  could  have  drawn  this  Venetian 
house  better. 

This  old  doorway  has  been  rendered  by  him  in  a 
fashion  which  no  one  has  ever  approached,  though 
many  have  since  tried.  Look  at  the  difference  be- 
tween the  old  water-worn  stone  work  at  the  bottom, 
and  the  rusty  iron  work  above,  and  the  way  the 
whole  design  has  been  made  into  a  decoration,  with 
his  monogram  of  "The  Butterfly"  crowning  all, 
harmonizing  with  the  rest  of  the  work.  The 
richness  and  depth  of  shadow  within  that  doorway 
is  almost  unbelievable.  And  in  several  of  the  prints 
the  water  is  altogether  painted,  so  strengthening 
and  giving  accent  and  support  to  the  architecture. 

Many  people  will  tell  you  that  the  etcher  should 
never  use  printing  ink  as  paint  as  it  has  been  used  to 
get  richness  of  effect,  as  in  "The  Doorway"  (Page 
175).  The  etcher  should  do  whatever  he  wants,  if 
he  can  do  it,  both  in  biting  and  printing  and  it  is  a 


PAGE  1  74      J.  A.  McN.  WHISTLER:  THE  DOORWAY,  VENICE.      ETCH- 
ING,  SHOWING  PRINTING  IN  TONE 


PAGE  178      WHISTLER  AT  HIS  PRESS 


ETCHING  177 

mighty  difficult  thing  to  do  what  he  wants.  Whistler 
did  paint  with  ink  on  this  plate,  and  brought  forth 
the  result  he  wanted.  It  is  true  that  later  he  did 
not  paint  with  ink.  This  design  is  painted  on  the 
plate.  That  is,  reinforced  by  ink,  and  that  is  what 
gives  the  richness.  When  these  plates  were  made 
no  one  wanted  them;  now  they  are  among  the 
most  beautiful  proofs,  it  is  said,  that  have  been  made 
of  Venetian  subjects.  They  are  not  one  bit  better 
than  when  they  were  made. 

In  his  later  work  he  depended  less  on  printing. 
This  is  one  of  the  plates  of  the  "Old  Guild  Houses  in 
Brussels."  It  is  said  in  one  of  the  Lives  of  Whistler 
that  it  is  really  an  expression  of  "the  bones  of 
architecture."  There  is  not  a  single,  superfluous 
line  in  it,  not  a  single  line  could  be  left  out.  Yet  it  is 
altogether  different  from  anything  he  did  before, 
and  altogether  different  from  anything  he  did 
after.     He  never  repeated  himself;   he  carried  on. 

Here  is  one  of  the  latest  London  plates  drawn 
with  this  same  simplicity  of  line,  and  yet  the  han- 
dling is  different.  Further  progress  he  was  always 
making. 

And  so  again  in  this  plate  made  in  Amsterdam. 
You  have  a  certain  amount  of  that  same  richness 
of  printing  of  the  Venice  series,  but  I  know  you  have 
never  seen  more  wonderful  drawing.  The  texture 
of  everything  in  this  plate  has  been  rendered  in  the 
most  truthful  fashion  by  the  most  skilful  craftsman 
of  all  time.  This  is  one  of  his  great  plates,  a  plate 
that  Rembrandt  never  came  near.  Of  course  you 
can  say  that  Whistler  made  no  great  religious 
subjects,  and  Rembrandt  never  did  any  subjects  of 
this  kind.  But  all  Whistler's  work  is  etching — 
some  of  Rembrandt's  is  manufacturing. 


178  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Here  he  stands  beside  his  printing-press  (Page  1 76) . 
He  always  wanted  someone  by  him  when  he  worked 
and  was  most  kind  in  allowing  one  to  see  how  he 
worked,  and  in  helping  one  and  teaching  one  every- 
thing he  knew.  There  were  no  secrets  with  Whistler. 
As  he  once  said  when  somebody  told  him,  "There 
is  no  secret  in  that,"  "Yes,"  he  said,  "the  secret 
is  in  doing  it."  And  that  is  where  the  secret  comes 
in,  in  all  art.  And  as  he  said  too  of  printing,  if  you 
don't  know  how  you  made  a  good  proof  and  can't 
do  it  again  what  was  the  use  of  doing  it  at  all? 

Another  etcher  was  Felix  Bracquemond.  He 
was  a  contemporary  of  Whistler,  and  did  some  great 
plates.  His  studies  of  birds  are  fine,  like  this 
"Raven."  But  his  greatest  work  was  done  in  por- 
traiture, in  copying  other  men's  work,  though  his 
own  portrait  (Page  214)  and  that  of  the  De  Goncourts 
rival  Diirer  in  their  way. 

Another  extremely  interesting  artist  was  Felicien 
Rops,  who  used  aquatint  and  dry  point  in  an 
extraordinary  manner.  He  is  a  very  great  tech- 
nician. You  want  to  look  up  his  works,  of  which 
there  are  reproductions  in  Ryerson  Library. 

Mary  Cassatt(Page  179)  is  another  notable  figure, 
and  this  is  a  dry  point  of  a  "Mother  and  Child" 
which  belongs  to  the  Museum.  Many  of  her  plates 
were  intended  to  be  printed  in  color.  The  color  was 
slight,  just  washed  on,  more  like  a  Japanese  print. 
She  worked  the  color  in  by  hand,  or  had  some 
very  clever  printer  assist  her  in  doing  it.  Some 
of  her  prints  are  most  charming,  not  only  in  line, 
but  in  color.  Most  color  in  etching  is  abominable. 
"Black  ink  on  white  paper  was  good  enough  for 
Rembrandt;  it  ought  to  be  good  enough  for  you," 
Whistler  said. 


PAGE  178      MARY  CASSATT:   MOTHER  AND  CHILD.      DRY  POINT 
PRINTED  IN  COLOR 


PAGE  181      F.  BUHOT:  COUNTRY  NEIGHBORS.       ETCHING 


PAGE   181       A.  ZORN:    PORTRAIT  OF  RENAN.       ETCHING 


ETCHING  181 

Felix  Buhot  (Page  i8o)  worked  in  every  conceiv- 
able sort  of  way.  There  are  all  sorts  of  technical 
methods  employed  in  this  extraordinary  plate  only 
two  or  three  inches  long,  but  size  has  nothing  to  do 
with  a  masterpiece.  Buhot  was  a  man  who  found 
beauty  in  commonplace  things.  I  think  he  was  the 
first  man  to  see  that  the  hansom  cab  was  worth 
drawing,  and  a  rainy  day  in  London  an  inspiration, 
and  he  drew  it  and  etched  it,  I  am  sure,  out  of 
doors.  You  couldn't  get  that  freshness  without 
doing  it  out  of  doors,  and  all  great  etchings  have 
been  done  from  nature. 

There  are  a  series  of  Embarkations  or  Landings 
at  Dover  and  Folkestone,  nearly  always  under  rain. 
The  studies  of  the  Houses  of  Parliament,  and  the 
French  cafes — all  these  are  very  notable  and  worth 
looking  up.  You  ought  to  look  up  all  Buhot's  work, 
because  if  you  don't  you  won't  know  what  not  to  do, 
or  what  has  been  done,  and  you  may  think  yourselves 
original  when  you  are  not. 

Zorn  (Page  i8o)  is  a  very  big  artist,  but  a  very 
bad  etcher.  That,  of  course,  is  rank  treason.  The 
drawing  of  Renan's  face  is  perfectly  stunning,  the 
etching  of  his  coat  perfectly  vile,  but  Zorn  is  a  painter, 
not  an  etcher.  He  seems  not  content  to  render 
Renan's  face  as  Rembrandt  did  his  mother,  and 
Whistler  his  niece,  but  he  has  to  show  that  Renan 
wore  a  black  coat,  and  he  does  so  with  a  character- 
less line,  a  painter's  line,  not  an  etcher's  line.  What 
difference  does  it  make  what  kind  of  coat  he  wore,  or 
what  color  it  was,  whether  black  or  white  ?  If  Zorn 
was  a  big  enough  etcher  he  would  have  shown  in 
three  lines  that  it  was  black.  But  he  has  to  prove  it 
l^lack  by  drawing  a  multitude  of  lines.  There  is  no 
real  feeling*  for  line  in  that  coat  at  all.     The  face  is 


182  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

full  of  it.  And  this  is  the  case  in  almost  all  of  Zorn's 
work.  Those  coats  and  things,  instead  of  being 
drawn  as  Whistler  would  have  done  them,  or  Rem- 
brandt would  have  done  them,  with  the  fewest  and 
most  expressive  lines,  are  fumbled  and  elaborated, 
and  scribbled  on.  The  only  person  who  can  appreci- 
ate useless  line  is  the  collector,  and  he  pays  an 
awful  lot  of  money  for  his  appreciation. 

Here  is  "The  Toast."  Look  at  that  oily,  smiling 
face  of  that  professor  wonderfully  done.  But  look 
at  the  awful  coat  again.  There  is  absolutely  no 
drawing  in  line  in  it  at  all.  That  old  crumpled-up 
hand  is  most  amazing,  and  so  is  the  glass  in  it. 
But  he  could  have  put,  as  Rembrandt  did,  the 
whole  feeling  in  it,  without  putting  a  single  one  of 
those  meaningless  lines  in.  And  that  is  where  Zorn 
is  altogether  wrong,  and  if  any  of  you  follow  Zorn  in 
this  way  you  will  go  wrong,  and  ten  times  more 
wrong,  because  there  is  nobody  in  this  room  who  can 
follow  him. 

Lepere  (Page  183)  was  on  the  other  hand  an 
etcher,  and  in  his  study  of  Amiens  cathedral  he  has 
made  a  great  etching.  He  died  a  few  months  ago. 
He  was  a  very  skilful  craftsman.  And  here  is  one 
of  the  old  markets  near  Notre  Dame,  with  the  effect 
of  morning  sunlight  supremely  rendered.  He  treated 
landscape  in  an  equally  interesting  fashion. 

I  wish  I  had  the  time  to  show  you  more.  I  will 
show  you  the  work  of  one  big  man,  and  that  is  Louis 
Legrand  (Page  195).  In  these  soft  ground  or  aquatint 
plates  he  has  produced  some  amazing  studies  of 
peasant  life  which  you  ought  to  see.  There  are  any 
number  of  those,  different  from  the  work  of  Mary 
Cassatt,  and  equally  interesting.  Each  keeps  its 
character,  and  without  character  there  cah  be  no  art. 


PAGE  182       A.  LEPERE.       CATHEDRALE  D' AMIENS,  JOUR  D'lNVEN- 
TAIRE.       ETCHING 


PAGE  185      MUIRHEAD  BONE:    ORVIETO.      ETCHING 


PAGE  185       FRANK  BRANGWYN  :    ETCHING 


ETCHING  185 

Max  Klinger  has  treated  etching  in  his  own 
fashion  and  in  the  German  fashion,  though  not  in 
Diirer's  fashion,  but  very  well. 

Bone  is  one  of  the  best-known  Englishmen,  and 
his  studies  of  architecture  and  of  scaffolding,  and 
his  war  work  done  in  England  made  him  deservedly 
a  great  reputation.  And  I  have  placed  these  two 
prints  together.  Here  is  a  slide  which  shows  you 
exactly  what  I  have  been  talking  to  you  about,  and 
that  is  that  the  etcher  should  make  every  one  of 
his  lines  mean  something.  Every  one  of  those  lines 
in  Bone's  plate  in  that  cliff  (Page  184)  and  the  land- 
ing has  a  meaning.  In  this  big  plate  (Page  184)  I 
cannot  find  a  single  line  that  means  anything,  any 
more  than  Zorn's  lines.  Both  Zorn  and  Brangwyn 
are  painters,  neither  is  an  etcher.  Brangwyn  ought 
to  paint  and  let  etching  alone.  He  tries  to  do  every- 
thing, and  sometimes  comes  down.  He  does  come 
down  very  much  in  his  big  etchings.  The  smaller 
Brangwyn's  work,  the  better  it  is.  His  subjects  are 
well  chosen  and  impressively  carried  out. 

Here  is  a  little  one  which  is  very  good  indeed,  the 
study  of  the  building  of  the  ship.  In  his  subjects  of 
work,  of  labor,  Brangwyn  has  made  deservedly  a 
great  success,  but  he  has  no  feeling,  mostly,  for 
line,  like  Zorn.  But  he  has  a  great  feeling  for 
composition;  in  most  of  his  paintings  and  drawings 
but  only  in  a  few  of  his  etchings,  he  has  done 
very  good  work  indeed.  Brangwyn  is  like  Zorn — a 
painter's  etcher,  and  not  an  etcher's  etcher. 

I  want  to  show  you  a  modern  printer's  shop  (Page 
286,  and  that  will  end  this  talk.  That  is  the  place 
that  I  have  to  work  in,  and  I  love  it.  It  is  one  of  the 
most  amazing  shops  in  America,  in  my  own  town, 
in  Philadelphia.     There  is  the  sort  of  press  that  I 


186  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

work  on.  And  in  the  other  talk  that  I  am  going 
to  give  I  can  show  you  what  making  etchings 
means.  It  means  working  like  a  slave.  But  it  is  a 
delightful  slavery,  and  it  is  work  that  I  love,  and 
I  love  to  do  the  whole  thing,  from  one  end  to  the 
other.  If  you  do  not  care  for  that,  if  you  take 
up  etching  and  do  not  find  the  biting  as  fascinating 
as  the  drawing,  and  the  printing  as  enthralling  as 
the  biting,  you  are  not  an  etcher  and  you  never 
will  be. 


.Menace  Jc   :<-ll,. 

THE  ETCHER 


MATHEY:   PORTRAIT  OF  FELICIEN  ROPS 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  ETCHING 
THE  METHODS  FOURTH  LECTURE  THURS- 
DAY APRIL  15  1920 

LAST  Tuesday  I  showed  you  a  number  of  prints 
which    are   universally    admitted    to   be   the 
^  greatest  that  have  ever  been  made,  because  in 
studying  any  art  what  you  want  to  study  is  good 


188  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

work  only.  And  that  is  what  I  have  been  showing 
you.  But  in  etching  there  is  another  and  an  equally 
important  part,  and  that  is  the  making  of  the  plate. 
Unless  the  artist  does  the  whole  of  this,  unless  he 
not  only  makes  the  design  on  the  plate,  but  etches 
it — that  is,  bites  it  into  the  metal,  and  then 
prints  it — he  is  not  an  etcher,  he  is  only  a  duffer,  a 
shirker,  because  if  he  does  not  do  all  the  work  it 
usually  is  because  he  cannot  do  it,  and  so  he  hires 
someone  else  to  do  it  for  him.  We  know  that  from 
the  time  of  Rembrandt  artists  have  always  done 
all  the  work  of  etching,  although  I  don't  believe 
that  Rembrandt  ever  tried,  as  I  am  going  to  do, 
to  make  a  plate  before  an  audience.  Well,  I  am 
going  to  try  to  do  it,  and  I  have  two  intelligent 
people  to  help  me.  And  even  the  three  of  us  may 
fail  to  produce  it;  at  any  rate  we  are  going  to 
have  a  go  at  it.  And  I  am  also  afraid  that  you 
will  not  be  able  to  see  a  good  many  of  the  different 
operations. 

The  first  thing  which  it  is  necessary  to  have  in 
order  to  make  an  etching  is  either  a  zinc  or  a  copper 
plate.  Copper  has  usually  been  used,  from  the 
beginning.  Certain  other  metals  have  been  tried. 
As  I  told  you  the  other  day,  Diirer  made  etchings 
upon  iron,  but  from  Rembrandt's  time  copper  has 
been  almost  universally  used. 

We  have  been  trying,  within  the  last  few  years, 
to  get  some  substitute  for  copper,  and  zinc  has  been 
greatly  employed  for  two  reasons:  One,  because  it 
is  very  much  lighter  than  copper,  and,  if  you  are 
going  to  make  plates  out  of  doors,  you  will  find  that 
copper  plates  are  very  cumbersome  things  to  carry 
about,  and  that  zinc  is  very  much  lighter;  and 
the  other  reason  is  that  it  is  cheaper. 


ETCHING  189 

But  zinc  is  not  so  sensitive,  not  so  sympathetic 
as  copper,  and  being  softer  it  will  not  yield  so 
many  impressions.  The  chief  reason  it  is  used 
is  because  of  its  lightness,  and  another  reason  is 
that  when  the  plate  is  prepared  for  etching,  and  the 
ground  is  put  on  as  I  shall  do  in  a  minute  or  two, 
you  see  your  lines  light,  white  in  the  black  ground, 
and  when  the  copper  is  grounded  you  see  them  a 
golden  hue  in  the  black  surface.  But  seeing  your 
lines  in  glittering  light  on  the  black  instead  of  in 
black  on  a  white  ground,  you  quickly  get  used  to. 

Another  metal  that  has  been  tried  is  aluminium, 
and  if  we  could  only  find  something  which  would 
bite  it  with  certainty  it  would  be  used  altogether, 
but  no  method  of  biting  aluminium,  with  any  degree 
of  certainty,  has  been  found.  A  plate  of  aluminium 
is  almost  as  light  as  a  sheet  of  paper. 

But  zinc  is  good  to  practice  on,  excepting  for 
dry  point,  which  I  will  tell  you  about  in  a  minute, 
because  zinc  is  very  soft  and  brittle,  and  any  lines 
drawn  on  it  with  sharp  points,  and  then  run  through 
the  press,  are  liable  to  break  or  wear,  so  that  most 
etchers  use  copper.  The  zinc  is  employed  more 
for  large  and  bold  designs,  like  these  by  Brangwyn. 
These  are  drawn  with  very  strong  lines,  and  the 
plates  are  very  thick  and  heavy,  almost  as  heavy  as 
copper.  But  he  uses  zinc,  as  I  think  most  etchers 
do,  because  it  is  cheaper,  and  for  bold,  big  work 
it  is  reliable.  Only  bigness  and  boldness  are  not 
desirable. 

The  first  thing  in  etching  is  to  heat  the  plate; 
take  a  wooden-handled  vise,  and  to  protect  the 
corner  of  the  copper  plate  from  being  scratched 
by  the  bite  of  the  vise  you  put  a  piece  of  paper 
between  the  jaws,  screw  up  the  vise,  and  put  the 


190  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

plate  on  the  heater.  It  will  take  a  minute  or  two 
to  heat  up. 

On  the  plate,  as  soon  as  it  gets  hot,  you  rub  this 
ball  of  ground,  which  is  made,  I  believe,  of  tallow 
and  varnish  and  black — I  do  not  really  know  what  it 
is  made  of,  for  the  makers  will  not  tell  me.  And 
they  won't  tell  you,  either.  This  ground  which  I 
use  is  made  by  Weber  of  Philadelphia  and  is  better 
than  you  can  make.  The  etching  ground  is  an 
acid-resisting  varnish,  which  must  have  three  or 
four  necessary  qualities;  the  most  important  is  that 
it  should  resist  the  acid.  The  varnish  also  must 
be  put  on  so  thinly  that  you  can  draw  through  it 
in  any  direction  with  a  needle  point,  a  small  instru- 
ment made  of  steel.  This  is  the  sort  that  is  mostly 
used.  It  is  a  double-ended  point,  and  the  drawing 
is  made  with  either  one  or  the  other  end  through 
the  coating  of  varnish,  which  I  will  now  try  to  put 
on.  I  rub  the  varnish  on  the  edges  of  the  heated 
plate  as  you  see. 

The  plate  has  to  be  fairly  well  heated  before 
the  varnish  will  melt.  Electric  heaters  are  not 
very  good.  The.  proper  one  is  made  like  this,  but 
has  gas  jets  under  it,  and  they  give  a  much  stronger 
and  more  uniform  heat,  and  you  can  regulate  such  a 
heater  better  than  you  can  this  electric  burner. 

The  varnish  is  put  on  around  the  edges  in  a 
layer,  and  as  soon  as  the  plate  gets  hot  it  melts  very 
easily,  forming  a  layer  of  varnish  after  one  gets  it  all 
around.  I  never  tried  one  of  these  electric  things 
before,  and  I  am  certain  I  never  will  again.  The 
etcher,  to  judge  if  the  plate  is  hot  enough,  either 
touches  it  with  the  varnish  to  see  if  it  will  melt,  or 
he  spits  on  it,  and  if  the  saliva  jumps  about,  it  is 
right. 


ETCHING  191 

Then  you  take  a  roller  of  this  sort,  a  rubber 
roller  fitted  into  a  wooden  handle,  and  by  rolling 
the  ground  off  of  the  edges  and  all  over  the 
plate  you  will  in  a  very  few  minutes  get  the 
entire  plate  coated  with  it  in  a  very  thin  layer, 
and  that  surface  of  varnish  is  what  you  draw 
through,  and  it  protects  the  parts  of  the  plates 
which  are  not  drawn  on.  The  roller  worked  in 
this  fashion  makes  the  ground  stick  very  firmly 
to  the  zinc  or  copper  plate.  The  more  you  roll  it 
the  thinner  and  the  more  smooth  the  surface 
becomes.  It  requires  only  a  very  thin  surface  to 
protect  it,  but  you  must  cover  it  all  over,  for  wher- 
ever there  is  a  hole  in  the  varnish  the  acid  will 
bite  in  and  make  a  hole  in  the  plate,  usually 
where  you  do  not  want  it. 

As  soon  as  the  ground  is  on,  you  take  half  a 
dozen  wax  tapers,  light  them,  and  holding  the 
plate  varnished  side  down,  so  that  the  flame  from 
the  tapers  does  not  touch  it,  you  pass  the  tapers 
back  and  forth  under  the  plate  in  every  direction, 
and  if  you  do  not  burn  your  fingers,  as  you  will 
frequently,  you  get  a  perfectly  black  surface  all  over 
it  in  a  minute  or  two.  This  is  quite  black  enough 
now.  It  is  not  absolutely  black.  You  want  it  only 
so  dark  that  you  can  see  the  lines  when  you  come 
to  draw  on  it.  If  you  burn  it  you  have  to  wash  it 
off  with  turpentine  and  ground  the  plate  again. 

This  is  the  method  of  commencing  to  make  a 
bitten  plate.  But  there  are  a  number  of  other 
methods  which  can  be  employed.  One  which  is 
much  used  is  dry  point.  That  is,  instead  of  ground- 
ing the  plate  as  I  have  done  some  artists  smoke  it 
as  I  did.  Then  you  take  another  point,  a  stronger 
and  a  heavier  one,  a  point  which  is  very  hard  and 


192  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

heavy,  and  make  your  drawing,  as  these  drawings 
have  been  made,  digging  into  the  ungrounded  cop- 
per or  zinc  plate.  Copper  is  better  for  making  dry 
points,  because  the  zinc  is  so  soft  and  so  brittle  that 
when  you  come  to  run  it  through  the  press  the 
ridges  of  metal  I  told  you  about  the  other  day, 
which  are  thrown  up  on  one  side  of  the  line  as  you 
draw  on  the  plate,  will  break  off.  If  you  want  a 
fine  or  grey  line  you  hold  the  point  vertically,  but  if 
you  want  a  very  deep  or  black  line  you  put  your 
point  down  at  an  angle  to  the  plate,  and  use  more 
muscle.  And  when  you  get  it  down  in  that  direc- 
tion, more  metal  is  thrown  up  at  the  side  of  the 
line.  This  ridge  of  metal  is  called  burr,  and  it  is 
this  ridge  of  metal  which  holds  the  ink  on  the  plate 
in  printing  and  gives  color  to  dry  point. 

There  are  many  other  methods  of  work.  You 
may  make  what  is  known  as  a  soft  ground  etching. 
You  take  this  ground,  and  melt  it  and  mix  it  with 
about  the  same  quantity  of  tallow.  It  will  never 
become  hard,  and  you  put  that  in  the  same  way  on  the 
face  of  the  plate  with  the  roller  and  smoke  it,  and 
when  the  plate  becomes  cool  you  put  a  sheet  of  rather 
rough  drawing  paper  on  the  face  of  it,  and  draw 
upon  the  paper,  which  should  be  put  firmly  down 
upon  the  plate;  you  can  fasten  it  down  by  wetting 
it,  and  pasting  it  on  the  back  of  the  plate  as  one 
stretches  paper  for  watercolor,  and  then  draw  with 
a  pencil  or  with  hard  charcoal  or  chalk  on  the  paper. 
The  point  penetrates  the  soft  ground  underneath  it, 
and  when  you  take  the  paper  off  you  lift  off  the 
ground  too  and  you  will  find  your  drawing  in  line 
on  the  metal  plate  shining  and  glittering,  and  then 
it  is  bitten  just  as  we  will  bite  this  one  in  a 
minute. 


PAGE  192      M.  LALANNE:      SOFT  GROUND  ETCHINGS 


F.  ROPS :  THE  DEVIL  OVER  PARIS.      ETCHING 


PAGE  182      LOUIS  LEGRAND :   MATERNITY.      AQUATINT 


M.  LALANNE:    PLATE    PRINTED    CLEAN    (LEFT);    WIPED'  WITH    A 
TINT  (RIGHT).      ETCHING 


ETCHING  197 

Aquatint  is  another  method.  And  I  discovered 
in  this  institution  only  the  other  day,  in  the  hands  of 
Mr.  Philbrick,  a  new  method  of  making  an  aquatint. 
The  old  fashion  was  like  this:  Take  the  clean  copper 
plate  and  either  pour  resin  dissolved  in  alcohol  over 
it,  and  then  slightly  heat  it,  when  the  resin  forms 
itself  into  little  granulated  dots,  and  the  spaces  be- 
tween those  can  be  bitten,  or  else  put  the  plate  in 
an  airtight  box,  which  has  a  door  in  the  front,  and 
then  put  in  that  box  a  quantity  of  powdered  resin. 
In  the  box  also  is  a  fan  which  is  made  to  revolve, 
and  the  dust  which  rises  is  allowed  to  settle  on 
the  plate,  which  is,  when  heated,  put  in  through  the 
door,  and  when  it  cools  the  resin  settles  in  granu- 
lated points,  on  the  face  of  the  plate. 

After  that  ground  had  been  laid  in  that  way — 
or  by  Mr.  Philbrick's  method  which  is  simpler,  for 
he  takes  an  eye-dropper  and  places  some  powdered 
resin  on  the  edge  of  one  plate  and  blows  it  with 
the  dropper  on  to  the  other,  and  then  heats  it; 
when  the  plate  is  cool  the  ground  sticks  to  it;  this 
is  the  simplest  method  that  I  have  ever  seen,  and  I 
hope  it  will  be  known  in  the  future  as  the  Philbrick 
method — then  the  artist  paints  the  subject  upon 
the  plate.  That  is,  he  commences,  and  instead  of 
painting  his  darks,  he  paints  out  on  this  grounded 
copper  plate  the  high-lights  and  bites  it  a  minute  or 
two  to  get  a  tone  over  it,  and  bring  out  the  lights, 
and  then  paints  the  design  around  the  lights,  put- 
ting the  plate  into  a  bath  of  acid  and  allowing 
it  to  bite.  The  painting  is  done  with  acid-resisting 
varnish  called  liquid  ground.  The  first  tones  are 
bitten  for  two  or  three  minutes,  and  then  when  you 
want  a  greater  dark  you  paint  out  more  of  the  design, 
then  put  it  in  the  bath  again,  biting  a  few  minutes 


X98  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

more,  and  then  paint  darker  parts  out  with  varnish, 
going  on  in  this  way  until  you  get  to  your  extreme 
dark.  It  is  a  very  difficult  process  for  most  of  us 
moderns. 

But  there  must  have  been  a  method  which  has 
been  completely  lost,  for  at  the  beginning  of  the 
last  century  there  were  a  large  number  of  very  won- 
derful aquatints  made  and  published  very  cheaply, 
and  very  widely,  in  England  and  in  France,  and 
there  must  be  some  practical  method  of  doing 
the  work  which  we  now  find  so  very  difficult,  for  the 
artists  of  that  day  did  not  seem  to  have  had  any 
trouble  at  all.  It  may  be  that  this  new  method 
is  the  right,  one;  I  am  going  to  try  it.  The  other 
day  I  saw  the  results  which  were  very  interesting. 

Another  method  which  somewhat  resembles  aqua- 
tint is  sandpaper  ground,  and  that  is  very  much 
more  simple,  and  easier  to  manage,  and  you  get 
stronger  and  richer  effects.  You  take  a  grounded 
copper  plate  and  lay  it  on  the  bed  of  the  press,  then 
lay  over  it  a  sheet  of  sand  or  emery  paper,  and 
run  sandpaper  and  plate  three  or  four  times  through 
the  press.  It  is  grounded  in  the  ordinary  way, 
just  as  I  grounded  that  plate;  and  after  you  run 
it  three  or  four  times  through  the  press,  the  sand- 
paper that  is  placed  on  top  of  it  breaks  the  ground 
into  little  granulations,  and  then  you  paint  with 
liquid  ground  your  design  on  the  surface,  biting 
your  darks  more  and  more  strongly  into  the  plate. 
It  is  rather  difficult  to  manage,  because  you  must 
know  exactly  what  you  are  about,  and  one  of  the 
things  in  all  etching  is  that  you  have  to  be  sure  of 
what  you  are  trying  to  do;  you  cannot  experiment 
much  with  the  plate;  you  hit  or  miss.  Some  people 
have   endless   patience,   but   I    never   heard   of  an 


ETCHING  199 

etcher  who  had  any.  You  either  get  things  or  you 
don't,  and  you  usually  don't.  I  speak  from  a  life- 
time of  experience  of  failures. 

Whistler  dreaded  this  work,  because  when  he  had 
made  his  beautiful  drawing  on  the  plate  there  was  a 
chance  of  spoiling  it  in  the  biting  or  in  the  printing, 
but  the  artist  who  does  not  carry  out  every  part  of 
the  work  is  not  an  etcher,  and  he  never  will  be. 

I  should  have  grounded  this  plate  about  twenty- 
four  hours  ago  and  let  it  stand  until  now  to  let 
the  varnish  cool  and  harden.  I  don't  know  at  all 
what  will  happen  working  on  it  so  soon.  You  take 
the  point  and  draw  with  it  as  you  would  draw  on  any 
other  surface.  There  are  only  three  or  four  things 
to  remember,  and  those  you  must  remember.  The 
drawing  you  make  on  the  plate  is  not  the  print  you 
are  going  to  get  off  the  printing-press.  The  draw- 
ing is  not  the  end  of  etching,  it  is  the  beginning, 
and  in  order  to  get  lines  to  print  properly,  you  have 
to  think  of  the  way  in  which  you  put  them  down. 
The  first  thing  you  have  to  remember  is  that  as  these 
lines  are  bitten  into  the  plate  they  enlarge;  there- 
fore, if  you  wish  to  make  a  plate  which  has  a  very 
delicate  distance,  you  can  draw  those  lines  which 
produce  the  distance  very  closely  together,  but  if 
you  leave  them  exposed  to  the  acid  for  more  than 
two  or  three  minutes  they  will  probably,  even  with 
the  best  of  grounds,  all  bite  together  into  a  dirty 
black  mess,  or  rather,  a  grey  mess,  for  the  ink  on 
the  surface,  as  I  will  show  you  in  a  few  minutes,  is 
of  no  account;  it  is  the  ink  which  goes  into  the 
lines  themselves  that  prints.  And  the  lines  have  a 
curious  way  of  acting. 

As  the  acid  bites  into  the  copper  (nitric  acid,  I 
use),  eating   down,   it    bites   into  A's  of  this   sort. 


200  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

and  if  you  have  enough  of  them,  too  close  together, 
you  will  find  that  your  surface  instead  of  showing 
delicate  lines,  will  be  a  dirty  mass,  the  acid  having 
bitten  the  lines  all  together.  Therefore  the  deeper 
you  want  your  lines  bitten,  the  farther  you  must 
place  them  apart. 

That  is  the  most  important  thing  to  remember, 
about  drawing  on  copper  or  any  other  metal  plates, 
that  the  print  is  made  from  the  ink  which  is  con- 
tained in  the  lines,  the  bitten  lines,  not  the  ink 
which  is  on  the  surface,  as  in  wood  engravings;  it 
is  the  ink  in  the  hollows  of  the  lines  which  the  press 
forces  out. 

I  cannot  really  pretend  to  make  a  drawing  in 
the  time  I  have,  but  this  young  lady  can  make  one 
while  I  am  going  on  with  preparing  plates.  It  is 
so  difficult  that  I  don't  want  to  make  a  mess  out 
of  it. 

After  the  drawing  has  been  made,  and  it  should 
all  be  made  with  the  same  point,  it  is  immersed  in 
a  bath  of  nitric  or  some  other  acid,  and  the  finest 
lines  are  allowed  to  bite  only  for  a  minute  or  two, 
then  varnish  is  painted  on  these  light  lines,  the 
middle  distance  is  bitten  twice  as  long,  and  then 
that  is  painted  out  with  the  stopping-out  varnish,  and 
the  foreground,  or  the  part  of  the  design  which  is  to 
be  the  strongest  is  left  in  the  bath  the  longest. 

There  are  other  ways  of  biting  plates.  One, 
which  is  a  very  interesting  method,  is  to  commence 
by  drawing  the  darks  first,  and  biting  them — the 
darks  of  the  design.  You  allow  them  to  bite  until 
you  think  they  are  bitten  enough,  then  draw  the 
lighter  lines  over  them.  The  whole  is  a  matter  of 
guess-work  backed  by  experience,  for  the  biting  of 
a  copper  plate  not  only  varies  with  each  day,  but 


ETCHING  201 

sometimes  with  each  hour  in  a  day.  Not  only  that, 
but  you  may  get  differences  in  the  composition  of 
the  copper  and  the  zinc.  In  fact,  no  etcher  is  ever 
sure  of  any  plate  that  he  is  doing,  and  the  longer  he 
works,  the  less  sure  he  becomes. 

After  you  have  drawn  the  black  lines  in  this 
negative  method,  you  draw  over  them  the  middle 
distance,  and  put  the  plate  in  the  bath  again,  and 
then  finally  draw  in  the  lightest  of  all.  All  bite 
together,  but  the  darks  will  have  bitten  three  times 
as  long  and  the  middle  tone  twice  as  long  as  the 
lights.  This  gives  relief  and  perspective;  before 
the  plate  is  bitten  it  looks  perfectly  flat. 

This  is  a  very  simple  method  of  biting,  theoreti- 
cally, but  as  a  matter  of  fact  you  have  to  work  out  a 
scheme  on  every  single  bit  of  your  design,  because 
you  cannot  change  it  at  all.  It  is  difficult  to  make 
corrections  in  the  plates,  unless  you  do  not  mind 
drudgery.  You  can  rub  out  with  charcoal  and 
scrape  out  and  burnish  out  lines,  but  it  is  a  long  and 
tedious  process,  and  there  is  only  one  artist  who  has 
done  much  in  this  way,  and  that  is  Rembrandt,  but 
Rembrandt  had  a  school,  and  I  am  sure  he  employed 
the  pupils  to  do  that  work  for  him.  Moderns  do 
not  have  assistants  usually;  you  see  I  am  lucky 
enough  this  afternoon  to  have  two. 

Now  I  take  the  acid  and  pour  it  on  the  drawing. 
There  is  one  thing  about  etching — it  is  not  a  clean 
process.  And  if  you  mind  burning  your  clothes  and 
staining  your  fingers  you  will  never  become  etchers. 
This  is  not  pure  acid,  but  is  mixed  with  an  equal 
proportion  of  water,  and  it  should  be  mixed  the 
day  before  you  use  it.  And  if  the  plate  is  put  in  the 
bath  and  a  little  of  it  poured  on  it,  it  ought  to  bite. 
I  say  it  should;  I  do  not  know  whether  it  will  or  not. 


202  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

because  frequently  it  does  not  do  anything,  at  least 
in  the  beginning.  The  varnish  protects  the  undrawn- 
on  parts  of  the  design,  only  those  parts  which  have 
been  drawn  on,  exposed  metal  under  the  lines,  will 
be  acted  on  by  the  acid.  One  has  to  coax  it  about 
to  make  it  bite.  It  is  biting  on  the  back  beautifully. 
And  now  it  is  biting  in  the  design.  I  know  this 
because  there  are  bubbles  rising;  they  show  the  acid 
is  at  work  on  the  metal. 

This  ground  is  so  well  made  that  you  can  draw 
in  any  direction  through  it,  and  yet  it  does  not 
crack  or  break  up.  That  is  one  of  the  most  impor- 
tant things  in  a  ground. 

After  you  have  bitten  the  plate  it  is  necessary 
to  dry  it  to  see  what  you  have  done,  as  nearly  as 
possible.  Then  if  you  hold  it  up  on  the  level  with 
your  eye  you  can  see  the  lines,  in  shadow  in  the 
black  surface  of  the  plate.  You  can  imagine  that 
the  ordinary  etching  is  not  made  in  quite  this 
free  and  easy  sort  of  fashion.  Although,  as  I 
told  you,  Rembrandt  made  that  plate,  the  "Six 
Bridge,"  while  the  waiter  was  hunting  up  the 
mustard-pot  in  some  remote  part  of  the  house. 

I  am  very  much  afraid  that  this  plate  will  be 
pretty  much  on  the  same  character  as  that — not  a 
great  work  of  art — I  do  not  mean  the  drawing, 
because  the  drawing  is  beautiful.  You  saw  the 
assistant  do  it.  It  is  now  bitten  enough  and  I  did 
not  stop  out  the  light  lines;    I  tilted  the  acid  about. 

The  ground  can  be  dissolved  immediately  by 
washing  it  off  with  turpentine.  You  see,  theo- 
retically, what  a  remarkably  simple  process  this 
part  of  it  is.  But  in  the  first  place  this  ground 
should  have  been  allowed  to  dry  for  at  least  a  day, 
and  then  an  hour  should  have  been  taken,  at  least. 


ETCHING  203 

for  the  drawing,  and,  as  Rembrandt  said  about 
etching,  you  should  take  one  hour  to  make  the 
drawing,  and  spend  one  week  with  the  stopping- 
out  varnish,  stopping  out  the  Hnes  that  you  do  not 
want  to  bite.  But  he,  instead  of  putting  the  plates 
into  a  rubber  bath  like  this,  on  which  the  acid  has 
no  effect,  made  a  border  of  wax  all  around  them, 
and  then  poured  the  acid  on  the  drawing  on  the  plate; 
the  border  of  wax  kept  it  from  running  off. 

The  modern  way  is  to  cover  the  back  of  the  plate 
with  varnish  of  some  sort  to  protect  it  from  the 
acid — any  kind  of  cheap  varnish  that  nitric  acid 
will  not  act  on  will  do — and  then  to  immerse  the 
whole  in  the  bath,  biting  and  stopping  out  as  I 
have  told  and  shown  you. 

But  it  is  very  much  more  interesting  and  amusing 
to  take  a  few  drops  of  acid,  as  I  did,  pour  it  on  the 
plate,  and  then  with  a  feather  drag  the  acid  about. 
It  gives  a  variety  to  the- lines  which  you  can  get  in 
no  other  way.  The  feather  is  also  used  to  brush 
away  the  bubbles  which  form  on  the  lines  and  stop 
the  biting. 

In  order  to  print  the  plate,  which  will  be  the 
next  operation,  you  again  put  it  on  the  heater,  and 
then  go  to  work  with  the  ink  roller.  This  is  one 
form  of  ink  roller,  but  there  is  another  and  a  much 
better  one;  the  roller  is  in  the  middle,  and  there 
is  a  handle  at  each  side  of  it.  That  is  the  newest 
form  of  etching  ink  roller. 

With  a  roller  of  that  sort  you  can  leave  a  great 
mass  of  solid  black  down  here  in  the  corner,  or  you 
can  leave  the  lightest  tints.  It  is  an  American 
invention,  and  an  excellent  one.  This  one  that  I 
am  using  is  an  older  form.  This  arrangement  on 
the  top  is  placed  there  so  as  to  keep  your  hands 


204  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

out  of  the  ink.  I  never  used  a  roller  of  this  sort,  and 
I  think  I  am  using  it  rather  cleverly.  In  beginning 
printing  it  is  well  to  rub  the  ink  into  the  lines  with 
your  lingers. 

When  the  plate  is  inked  in  this  way  you  slide 
it  on  to  this  wooden  box,  which  stands  alongside, 
and  when  the  plate  gets  too  cool  you  slide  it  back 
again  on  to  the  heater,  then  taking  a  piece  of  rag, 
folding  it  up,  and  putting  it  into  the  palm  of  your 
hand — you  will  be  able  to  do  this  after  several 
years  of  experience — you  proceed  to  wipe  the  ink 
off  the  surface  of  the  plate  and  not  out  of  the  lines, 
and  I  can  tell  you  that  it  is  a  craft  that  requires 
rather  a  little  bit  of  experience.  But  the  man,  as 
I  said,  who  makes  an  etching  must  care  just  as 
much  about  the  biting  and  the  printing  as  any 
other  part  of  it.  There  is  an  equal  amount  of  art  in 
every  one  of  the  three  stages  of  making  a  plate: 
in  the  drawing,  in  the  biting,  and  finally  in  the 
printing. 

And  you  may  do  anything  in  printing.  Some 
artists  maintain  that  an  etching  should  be  printed 
simply  and  cleanly,  or  almost  cleanly,  leaving  only 
a  slight  film  of  ink  on  the  surface.  Others  maintain 
that  you  should  paint  on  the  surface,  in  fact,  you 
can  paint  on  the  plate  with  ink,  and  then  by  dragging 
it  around,  leaving  some  here  and  some  there,  you 
can  get  the  most  varied  effects. 

I  do  not  think  this  plate  is  quite  as  much  a  work 
of  art  as  I  thought  it  was.  Still  it  is  a  practical 
demonstration  of  the  way  I  work. 

Now,  you  can  see  from  this — or  I  hope  you  can — 
that  the  ink  has  been  wiped  off  the  surface  of  the 
plate  more  or  less,  but  not  out  of  the  lines,  and  you 
must   keep   the   ink   in   the   lines,   and   doing    that 


ETCHING  205 

and  yet  getting  it  off  the  face  of  the  copper  is  not 
an  altogether  easy  affair. 

When  you  have  done  this,  the  next  thing  is  to 
prove  the  plate,  which  you  do  by  putting  it  on  the  bed 
of  the  press.  And  I  might  as  well  say  that  this  press 
(Page  213)  has  been  built  here  by  Mr.  Sturgis,  in  Chi- 
cago, and  is  the  most  perfect  printing-press  I  have 
ever  seen.  It  is  based  on  an  English  copper  plate 
press  that  was  manufactured  in  England  by  Had- 
don  &  Son  from  Sir  Frank  Short's  design;  but  like 
most  English  things  that  are  very  well  made,  it  was 
very  cumbersome;  the  space  which  the  English  press 
takes  up  is  twice  as  much  as  this.  And  there  was 
no  reason  for  that  at  all.  Mr.  Sturgis  has  designed 
a  machine  which,  I  believe,  is  going  to  revolutionize 
printing-presses  in  Europe,  and  in  this  country  too. 
It  seems  to  me  it  is  the  most  excellently  designed 
and  the  most  excellently  made  press  that  I  have 
come  upon.  There  are  many  details  about  it, 
such  as  the  extra  press  underneath  for  pressing 
prints  and  drying  paper.  That  also  acts  as  a 
sort  of  weight  in  the  center,  keeping  the  balance  of 
the  press  perfectly. 

The  whole  theory  of  the  press,  as  you  will  see  in 
a  minute,  is  this.  At  the  bottom  is  a  big  solid 
roller,  on  the  top  is  a  flat  plank,  or  bed  of  the 
press,  as  it  is  called,  and  above  is  another  smaller 
cylinder.  When  the  plate  is  placed  on  the  bed  of  the 
press  and  a  sheet  of  dampened  paper  laid  on  it — 
you  have  to  dampen  the  paper  in  order  to  get  the 
ink  to  come  out  of  the  lines,  to  print  properly — 
then  on  top  of  the  paper  three  or  four  pieces  of 
blotting  paper  are  placed  and  the  blankets  on  top  of 
them,  and  you  turn  the  wheel,  and  the  plate  passes 
between  the  cylinders,  the  blankets  take  the  direct 


206  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

pressure  off,  and  also  go  into  the  bitten  lines  in  the 
copper,  and  draw  the  ink  out  as  the  plate  passes 
through.     And  here  is  the  work  of  art. 

In  the  first  place  there  is  not  half  enough  ink  in 
the  lines — we  can  get  a  great  deal  more — then  we 
can  get  them  a  great  deal  stronger.  But  this  is 
the  whole  theory,  and  the  practice  too,  of  making 
etchings.  It  is  a  serious  affair,  and  one  not  to  be 
lightly  trifled  with.  But  it  is  interesting  to  be  able 
to  show  you  the  way  in  which  etching  is  done. 

There  are  many  other  forms  of  etching;  one  very 
interesting  method  is  to  take  a  plain  copper  plate 
and  then  cover  the  face  of  it  with  a  coating  of  ink,  as 
I  did  before  with  the  roller,  then  handing  it  to  the 
eminent  artist  who  will  now  proceed,  by  means  of 
rags  and  paint  brushes  and  anything  which  comes 
handy,  especially  his  fingers,  to  make  a  design  on 
it,  painting  from  dark  to  light.  When  that  design 
is  made — and  he  can  do  it  in  a  very  few  minutes; 
you  can  see  how  quickly  he  does  it^t  is  passed 
through  the  press,  and  the  design  should  come  off 
on  the  paper.  That  is  called  a  monotype.  But  that 
is  the  way  in  which  complicated  printing  is  done, 
by  leaving  more  or  less  ink  on  the  plate. 

You  remember  those  two  Venetian  studies  by 
Whistler  that  I  showed  you,  though  they  were  not 
done  so  freely  as  Mr.  Philbrick  is  doing  it — still 
that  is  the  method  in  which  the  printing  by  Whistler 
was  done,  by  painting  the  design  on  the  lines  which 
had  been  etched,  as  this  one  was,  on  the  plate. 
I  can  easily  get  an  entirely  different  effect  out  of  any 
of  these  plates  in  the  same  way,  by  leaving  more  or 
less  ink  on  them. 

Many  people  have  carried  monotyping  to  such 
an  extent  that  they  make  monotypes  in  color,  but 


ETCHING  207 

it  grew  out  of  this  method  of  leaving  a  tone  over  the 
face  of  the  plate  and  then  wiping  the  design  out  of 
that.  Sometimes  very  beautiful  results  have  been 
obtained.  (I  ought  to  have  someone  to  do  the  talk- 
ing while  I  am  doing  this  work.) 

Even  the  folding  of  the  ink  rag  is  a  thing  that  has 
to  be  mastered,  because  you  have  to  get  the  rag  folded 
up  into  a  rather  loose,  soft  pad,  and  in  order  to  wipe  a 
plate  you  must  carry  this  pad  in  the  palm  of  your 
hand.  If  you  use  your  fingers  you  pull  all  the  ink 
out  of  the  lines,  and  the  ability  of  the  great  printer 
is  to  coax  and  to  wipe  and  to  paint  and  drag  ink 
on  the  plate  with  this  very  sensitive  mass  of  inky 
rag.  It  requires,  in  order  to  do  good  work,  a 
very  great  deal  of  practice,  and  there  have  been  very 
few  who  have  mastered  it.  Everyone  admits  at 
the  present  time  that  the  greatest  modern  master 
of  printing  was  Whistler;  even  professional  printers 
have  been  compelled  to  admit  that.  A  few  years 
ago  they  said  he  was  all  wrong. 

It  has  been  said  by  many  authorities  that  Rem- 
brandt never  did  anything  of  this  sort;  that  he  wiped 
his  plates  clean.  But  we  have  no  proof  of  that, 
and  it  may  be  that  these  prints,  which  were  made 
three  hundred  years  ago,  had  a  tone  of  ink  on  them, 
and  the  ink  which  was  left  on  the  surface  dried  to 
dust,  for  at  times  when  you  take  a  print  out  to 
look  at  it,  that  tone  has  become  dust  and  blows 
away.  I  have  heard  of  this  happening  after  a 
print  had  been  put  away  for  twenty-five  years, 
and  taken  out  of  a  drawer  or  portfolio  where  it  had 
been  kept. 

There  are  many  other  things  that  a  printer  does 
in  order  to  get  tone  after  he  has  wiped  the  plate 
nearly  dry  on  the  surface.     By  one  motion  of  his 


208  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

hand  he  wipes  the  ink  off  the  surface,  and  by  another 
almost  similar,  but  a  reverse  motion,  he  wipes  it 
back  again,  but  all  that  takes  enormous  practice. 
If  you  do  not  care  for  the  mysteries  of  printing,  again 
I  can  only  say  you  will  never  be  an  etcher. 

There  are  other  ways  of  making  these  fascinating 
plates.  One  modern  form  of  reproduction  which 
I  should  like  to  refer  to  is  rotogravure — which  you 
see  in  the  Sunday  supplements.  This  is  the  appli- 
cation to  rapid  printing  of  etching.  Drawings  or 
prints  are  photographed  and  transferred  to  copper 
cylinders.  These  are  etched  as  other  copper  plates, 
then  placed  on  the  press  designed  for  them,  ink  is 
spread  on  the  surface  and  in  the  lines,  and  then  as 
the  cylinder  revolves  a  sharp  razor  blade  scrapes  the 
ink  off  the  face  of  the  cylinder,  the  ink  in  the  lines 
coming  out  on  sheets  of  paper  as  the  cylinder 
revolves  farther.  This  is  the  method  by  which 
the  rotogravure  sections  of  papers  and  magazines 
are  made.  It  is  a  modern  German  method  only 
half  understood  here — though  used  in  most  of  the 
weekly  papers. 

Another  scheme  is  that  of  printing  plates  in  color. 
This  is  very  popular  at  the  present  moment.  Vast 
numbers  of  these  color  etchings  are  made  today. 
Most  of  them  the  artist  had  no  part  in.  They  are 
a  combination  of  misdirected  energy  and  photog- 
raphy. You  can  see  several  of  them  on  Michigan 
Boulevard  this  afternoon  in  the  shop  windows.  I 
was  told  by  one  artist  that  he  had  nothing  to  do 
with  them  except  to  sign  his  name  and  draw  his 
check.  He  was  very  successful  with  that  latter 
proposition.  But  if  you  want  to  become  an  etcher 
there  is  something  more  to  be  done  than  signing  your 
name  and  drawing  a  check. 


ETCHING  209 

Now  these  color  operations  I  do  not  believe  in, 
even  though  the  artists  did  them  all  themselves, 
because  a  person  who  really  does  not  care  for  the 
beauty  of  good  black  ink  on  good  white  paper  is 
not  an  etcher. 

There  are  other  ways  of  making  tones  which  are 
much  used  by  printers. 

They  have  a  fashion,  when  the  plate  is  wiped, 
of  going  over  it  with  a  trembling  motion  of  their  hand 
holding  a  rag,  and  producing  a  tint  in  that  way — 
dragging  the  ink  out  of  the  lines  slightly.  This  is 
called  retroussage. 

But  after  all,  the  etching  is  not  dependent,  or 
should  not  be  dependent,  on  printing.  If  you  cannot 
get  the  lines  right,  get  good  lines;  if  the  drawing  is 
not  right  and  the  biting  is  not  right,  no  amount  of 
printing  will  make  a  good  thing  out  of  it. 

You  see  how  beautifully  this  press  runs.  With 
the  old-fashioned  press  you  were  forced  to  climb 
up  and  down  on  it.  It  was  a  very  interesting 
performance.  It  was  far  better  exercise  than  golf, 
and  more  amusing,  and  with  more  beneficial  results. 
But  all  the  same,  I  must  say  that  it  was  not  a  press 
which  ran  as  smoothly  and  as  beautifully  as  this 
does. 

On  this  print  you  can  see  that  there  is  not  half 
enough  ink,  but  you  can  see  that  I  again  have  left  the 
tone  all  over  it,  and  brought  the  strength  of  the  design 
out.  Or  you  can  leave  it  clean  and  white.  There 
is  no  end  to  the  methods  you  can  employ. 

The  great  thing  is  that  the  etcher  should  not 
depend  on  printing,  but  he  should  depend  on  the 
excellence  of  his  drawing  and  the  accuracy  of  his 
biting,  and  if  he  has  done  that  the  printing  will 
probably  more  or  less  take  care  of  itself.     Unless 


210  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

you  do  care  for  all  these  different  processes  which 
go  to  make  up  an  etching,  I  do  not  think  you  will 
ever  become  very  great  etchers,  and  the  man  who 
does  not  enjoy  printing,  and  who  does  not  enjoy 
biting,  has  the  chance  of  enjoying  only  half  of  the 
work. 

The  hour  is  almost  up.  If  you  want  we  can  print 
some  more  of  these  plates.  There  are  a  number 
here  that  the  students  have  done  with  a  great  deal 
of  care,  and  it  might  be  well  to  try  one  or  two  of 
them. 

The  method  I  have  shown  you  is  a  method  that 
all  artists  employ  both  for  biting  and  printing.  It 
is  really  a  very  simple  process,  and  in  fact  nearly 
all  arts  or  crafts  are  simple.  The  only  thing  is  to 
take  advantage  of  these  simple  methods  and  to 
try  to  do  your  work  just  as  well  as  you  can.  And 
I  can  tell  you,  in  order  to  do  it  well,  it  will  take  a 
whole  lifetime  of  practice. 

If  you  want  to  wait  I  can  show  you  some  more. 
But  the  time  is  up,  and  I  will  try  only  one  or  two, 
and  if  any  of  you  care  to  stay  to  see  how  the  print- 
ing is  done  and  what  these  plates  look  like  we  will 
go  on  with  them.  Some  of  them  may  produce  much 
better  results  than  we  have  had  so  far,  because  these 
were  really  done  with  some  care,  and  we  must  try 
to  print  everything  with  the  greatest  care. 

That  is  really  all  there  is  to  the  technique  of 
etching  and  of  copper-plate  printing.  But  you  want 
to  exercise  the  greatest  of  care  and  not  do  it  in  this 
haphazard  sort  of  fashion,  though  an  etched  plate 
apparently  will  stand  a  great  deal  of  strenuous 
treatment. 

This  is  a  far  better  plate,  and  one  that  has  been 
done  with  a  great  deal  of  thought  for  line.     As  I  did 


ETCHING  211 

not  make  this — I  never  saw  the  plate  before — I 
would  not  be  surprised  if  I  could  not  get  anything 
out  of  it.  It  is  not  inked  enough;  there  is  not 
enough  ink  in  the  lines,  but  still  it  comes  off  pretty 
well,  and  is  a  rather  charming  design.  It  was  done 
here  in  the  school. 

There  is  another  thing  about  printing:  The  ink 
does  not  really  get  into  the  lines  until  after  three 
or  four  proofs  have  been  pulled,  and  the  first  proofs 
that  one  gets  are  rarely  the  best.  Then  after  three 
or  four  have  been  printed  you  get  some  of  the 
best  of  all,  and  then  you  have,  in  most  cases,  the 
horrible  disappointment  of  seeing  the  design  go, 
and  it  finally  fades  away  until  there  is  nothing 
left  of  it. 

Some  plates  will  give  only  a  few  proofs,  and 
others  will  give  quite  a  number.  Any  number  of 
prints  can  be  made  by  steel-facing  the  plate — 
putting  a  coat  of  steel  on  it,  really  electroplating  it. 

In  the  old  days  one  used  a  machine  like  this. 
You  took  this  pad  and  pounded  it  in  the  ink  vio- 
lently, and  then  you  pounded  the  surface  of  the 
plate  with  it.  The  ink  went  into  the  lines  all 
right,  but  the  lines  went  out  of  the  copper,  and  the 
consequence  was  that  it  was  possible,  except  in  the 
rarest  of  cases,  to  get  only  a  few  proofs  of  dry  points 
which  were  worth  anything. 

But  with  this  new  roller  you  can  get  a  large 
number  of  proofs  equally  good.  The  collector  is 
very  much  disappointed  with  that,  because  from 
the  collector's  point  of  view  rarity  is  the  great  merit 
of  all  etching.  If  there  is  only  one  proof,  and  the 
artist  did  not  like  that,  that  is  the  one  that  the  col- 
lector tries  to  get  hold  of.  For  instance,  there  is  a 
celebrated  one — I  think  it  is  of  a  rabbit  or  a  pig — 


212  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

that  Rembrandt  sketched  on  a  corner  of  a  plate, 
which  he  did  not  like,  and  there  are  only  two  or 
three  proofs  of  it  known  to  exist,  but  the  whole 
world  of  collectors  is  running  around  hunting  for 
those  proofs.  The  fact  that  later  he  drew  all  over 
the  plate,  and  satisfied  himself  when  he  bit  it,  proves 
it  from  the  collector's  point  of  view  to  be  utterly 
worthless,  /^.rtists  differ  from  collectors  in  those 
things,  and  they  both  have  their  point  of  view. 
But  what  I  cannot  understand  is  this:  Why  a 
collector  who  wants  something  which  is  rare,  does 
not  buy  original  drawings,  which  are  unique.  But 
that  is  the  sort  of  thing  that  collectors  do  not 
want;  instead,  they  buy  rare  proofs,  and  they  will 
not  buy  originals.  Often  the  last  state  of  a  plate 
is  far  better  than  the  first,  though  the  artist  may 
spoil  it  by  overworking — but  usually  the  first  state, 
though  incomplete  or  unsatisfactory  to  the  artist, 
is  the  one  the  collector  collects  for  its  rarity. 

I  can  tell  you  about  a  very  celebrated  plate 
that  Whistler  did.  He  told  me  that  he  was  sitting 
on  a  wharf,  when  some  gentlemen,  who  were  of  the 
laboring  profession,  and  who  were  building  a  wall 
behind  him,  dropped  a  brick.  It  did  not  hit  him, 
but  he  jumped  some  feet  away,  to  avoid  being  hit, 
and  as  he  jumped,  he  scratched  the  copper  plate 
he  was  drawing  on  from  top  to  bottom.  I  can 
assure  you  that  print  with  the  scratch  on  it  is  one 
of  the  Whistler  prizes  most  cherished  by  collectors. 
The  print  that  has  not  a  scratch  on  it  is  of  very 
little  account  to  anyone  except  artists. 

I  cannot  go  into  mezzotints — the  beautiful 
maniere  noire^  in  which  the  plate,  as  I  have  said, 
is  covered  with  a  multitude  of  little  points  made 
by    rocking    a    cradlelike    instrument    armed    with 


M  -^4^-f^-[\^_ 


PAGE  205      ETCHING  PRESS  DESIGNED  AND  MADE 
BY  MR.  LEE  STURGIS  OF  CHICAGO 


Pen-and-ink  sketch  by  pupil  of  Mr.  Philbrick.     Press  used 
in  demonstration  at  Mr.  Pennell's  lecture. 


'  ] 


PAGE  178       P.  RAJON:   BRACQUEMOND,  THE  ETCHER 


ETCHING  215 

sharp  teeth  over  the  plate  in  every  direction.  The 
holes  made  in  the  plate  hold  the  ink,  and  it  will  print 
quite  solid  black.  And  the  design  is  drawn  on  the 
plate  with  scrapers  and  burnishers  scraping  and 
burnishing  the  points  away,  making  the  drawing  by 
polishing  and  scraping  the  design  on  the  face  of  the 
plate,  drawing  the  design  from  dark  to  light  with 
scrapers. 

Nor  can  I  take  up  steel  engraving.  This  like 
wood  engraving  is  scarcely  practiced  today.  The 
steel  engraver  works  very  much  in  the  same 
fashion  as  the  wood  engraver.  To  do  good  work 
is  as  difficult  by  one  method  as  the  other  and  that 
is  one  reason  why  so  little  of  it  is  done.  Steel  is 
little  used  for  etching  or  dry  point.  It  is  too 
hard  and  unsympathetic;  but  when  large  editions 
from  copper  plates  are  wanted,  each  plate  has  a 
coating,  a  facing  of  steel  deposited  on  it  by  electro- 
plating, and  any  number  of  prints  can  be  pulled. 

There  is  another  charm  about  etching,  too,  and 
that  is  the  collecting  of  old  paper.  You  cannot 
imagine  anything  more  delightful  than  the  chase  up 
and  down  in  old  rag  shops  which  used  to  exist  before 
the  war,  and  in  old  book  shops,  hunting  for  old 
paper.  A  paper  which  is  old  does  take  ink  very 
much  better  than  modern  paper.  Possibly  we  are 
making  equally  good  paper  today,  but  a  paper 
that  has  the  beautiful  tone  of  time  on  it,  and  the 
beautiful  watermarks  that  some  of  those  old  makers 
put  in  it,  is  something  which,  when  you  can  find  it, 
you  want  to  treasure. 

I  have  found  paper  in  all  the  old  Italian  towns 
and  many  of  the  French  towns,  and  also  in  Holland. 
The  French,  Italian,  and  Dutch  papers  were  per- 
fectly beautiful  and  wonderfully  made,  and  they  are 


216  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

delightful  to  print  on.  Often  you  can  draw  on 
them,  but  we  etchers  do  not  like  to  see  them  wasted 
for  that  purpose,  so  we  preserve  all  the  paper  that 
we  can  find.  But  I  am  afraid  that  in  the  war  there 
has  been  a  great  deal  of  good  paper  destroyed. 
For  example,  some  of  the  modern  mills  north  of 
Venice  are  now  ruined,  and  any  amount  of  paper, 
and  not  only  paper,  but  works  of  art — for  the 
making  of  good  paper  was  a  work  of  art — are 
gone  with  the  towns  and  the  people  and  can  never 
be  replaced. 

Here  is  another  proof  I  have  made.  There  is 
not  enough  ink  on  that.  It  would  probably  come 
up,  but  it  has  not  enough  ink  yet.  The  plate  would 
have  to  be  inked  three  or  four  times,  printed  three 
or  four  times,  before  I  could  get  the  proper  strength 
and  color  out  of  it.  And  the  getting  of  the  ink 
right,  the  making  of  the  different  strengths  of  ink, 
is  an  art  in  itself,  and  it  requires  the  most  endless 
practice,  and  practice  every  time  you  try  to  print, 
because  printing  ink  changes  just  as  much  as  nitric 
acid.  And  every  change  in  the  weather  has  an 
effect.  But  it  is  a  most  fascinating  art.  And  one 
of  the  great  reasons  why  it  is  so  fascinating  is  the 
uncertainty,  and  if  you  are  not  fascinated  with  that 
sort  of  thing  you  will  nevef  be  an  etcher. 

We  could  go  on,  but  I  think  the  time  is  far  past, 
and  I  do  not  think  I  will  keep  you  any  longer. 
Besides  I  have  made  and  printed  an  etching.  Now 
go  and  work  yourselves — for  if  I  have  not  interested 
you  enough  to  do  so,  we  have  wasted  the  afternoon. 


HENRI  TOULOUSE-LAUTREC:    THE  PRINTER.      LITHOGRAPH 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  LITHOGRAPHY 
THE  ARTISTS  FIFTH  LECTURE  TUESDAY 
APRIL  20  1920 

IN  the  previous  lectures  in  which  I  tried  to  tell 
you  something  about  wood  cutting,  engraving, 
and  etching,  I  told  you  that  those  forms  of  the 
graphic  arts  dated  back  almost  to  the  beginning  of 
time,  especially  wood  cutting,  and  that  etching  was 
invented  early  in  the  Middle  Ages.  I  said  the  evo- 
lution of  those  forms  of  art  took  long,  and  the 
methods  were,  in  the  case  of  wood  engraving,  obscure, 
but  of  etching  we  know  considerably  more. 

This  afternoon  I  want  to  tell  you  about  lithog- 
raphy. And  of  lithography  we  know  everything 
about  its  invention,  why  it  was  invented,  who 
invented  it,  how  the  work  was  done.  And  that  in- 
ventor was  such  a  great  man  in  his  own  way  that 
nothing  at   all   has   been   discovered  since   his  day 


218  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

regarding  lithography  save  the  application  of  the 
steam  press  and  photography  to  it. 

The  art  was  invented  between  the  years  1796  and 
1798,  by  a  German  musician  and  playwright, 
Alois  Senefelder.  Senefelder  was  not  in  a  very 
flourishing  condition  at  that  time,  and  he  tried  to 
find  some  way  of  engraving  or  reproducing  and 
printing  his  plays  and  his  music.  He  searched  for  a 
long  time  vaguely,  because  he  was  suflFering  from 
exactly  the  same  thing  that  you  are — there  were 
no  technical  schools  at  that  time  in  Germany,  and 
he  had  to  invent  everything  for  himself — though 
I  scarcely  believe  that  many  of  you  would  take  the 
trouble  to  do  that.  Senefelder  invented  what 
he  thought  was  lithography,  stone  printing,  in  the 
year  1796,  but  it  was  not  lithography  at  all,  only 
the  art  of  engraving  on  stone,  just  as  Blake  was 
engraving  on  metal  in  England  about  the  same  time. 

Senefelder  had  no  idea  that  he  was  an  artist, 
though  he  later  attempted  to  become  one.  His 
desire  was  to  print  his  music  from  stone  plates, 
which  he  thought  would  be  cheaper  than  copper. 

He  made  his  drawings  and  wrote  his  music  with  a 
greasy  ink  which  he  invented,  writing  the  notes 
backward  on  the  stone.  And  when  they  were 
written  he  poured  nitric  acid  on  the  face  of  the 
stone,  just  as  Blake  did,  and  the  ink,  which  was 
an  acid-resisting  varnish,  like  etching  ground,  pro- 
tected the  parts  of  the  stone  drawn  on,  and  bit 
and  reduced  the  undrawn-on  parts  and  left  the 
notes  of  the  music  standing  in  relief. 

He  had  not  discovered  anything,  for  if  he  had 
taken  the  trouble  to  go  into  the  nearest  churchyard 
in  Munich  he  would  have  found  this  form  of  en- 
graving  on    tombstones    dating    from   the   time  of 


LITHOGRAPHY  219 

Diirer.  He  did  not  take  up  art;  so  far  as  is  known, 
this  is  the  only  drawing  that  he  ever  made — a 
study  of  a  house  afire— and  beyond  its  historic 
importance  I  do  not  think  it  amounts  to  much 
except  to  prove  he  was  not  much  of  an  artist. 
It  was  done  in  the  same  way  as  his  music.  He 
found  out  that  he  was  not  on  the  right  track,  and 
after  thousands  of  experiments,  as  he  says  in  his 
book.  The  Grammar  of  Lithography — for  everything 
that  he  did  is  described  in  that  book — he  found 
another  method. 

In  trying  to  get  his  music  and  his  plays  on  the 
stone  it  occurred  to  Senefelder  on  one  occasion — or 
as  he  says,  after  thousands  of  experiments — that  if 
he  made  his  drawing  or  writing  with  the  greasy 
ink  with  which  he  drew  on  paper,  and  then  trans- 
ferred that  drawing  from  the  paper  to  the  stone,  and 
then  if  it  came  off  from  the  paper  to  the  stone  why 
could  he  not  transfer  it  back  again  on  to  the  paper, 
and  so  get  a  print.  He  tried  and  succeeded  and 
lithography  was  invented. 

He  interested  his  artist  friend,  Strixner,  who  made 
this  drawing  with  pen  and  ink — the  greasy  ink 
made  of  tallow  and  grease  dissolved  in  water — on  a 
piece  of  paper,  and  he  took  that  paper  and  laid  it 
face  down  on  the  stone  and  ran  it  through  a  copper 
plate  press,  of  a  very  primitive  sort,  like  one  of  those 
I  showed  you  on  the  screen  the  other  day,  and  the 
drawing  came  off  of  the  paper  on  to  the  stone.  And 
it  then  occurred  to  him  that  if  he  were  to  dampen  the 
stone,  put  some  more  ink  on  the  face  of  it,  lay  a  piece 
of  paper  over  it,  and  run  it  again  through  the  press, 
the  drawing  might  come  off  again  on  to  the  paper. 

He  tried  and  it  did,  and  that  is  the  whole  of 
lithography.     The  surface  of  the  stone  or  plate  is 


220  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

neither  raised  nor  lowered,  the  hnes  are  neither  in 
intagho  nor  reHef,  the  print  is  made  from  the  flat 
surface. 

As  I  told  youj  a  wood  engraving  or  a  wood  cut  is 
made  by  putting  ink  on  lines  which  project  above 
the  rest  of  the  lowered  block.  Etching,  as  I  also 
pointed  out  to  you,  is  made  by  cutting  or  biting 
lines  into  a  plate  which  print  when  inked.  But  in 
lithography  there  is  no  engraving  or  etching.  The 
lines  are  flat  on  the  surface  and  the  drawing  prints 
because  grease  attracts  grease  and  repels  water.  It 
is  a  chemical  action  and  his  name  for  it  was  chemi- 
cal printing.  The  drawing  which  the  artist  makes 
on  paper  or  on  stone  or  on  a  metal  plate  is  not  bitten 
into  reliefer  cut  into  the  plate.  It  is  a  multiplica- 
tion of  the  original  drawing  which  the  artist  made, 
not  a  reproduction.  And  this  is  the  whole  of  lithogra- 
phy; and  the  diff'erence  between  it  and  all  the  other 
graphic  arts.  It  is  not  an  engraving,  not  a  repro- 
duction of  a  work  of  art,  but  a  multiplication  of  it. 
It  is  the  simplest  and  the  most  artistic  method  that 
has  ever  been  invented  or  ever  practiced. 

Soon  after  Senefelder  showed  to  Strixner  and 
other  contemporary  German  artists  the  merit  of  the 
method,  it  was  taken  up,  and  the  first  thing  that 
was  done  was  the  publication  of  Galleries^  as  they 
were  called — portfolios  of  copies  of  the  pictures  in 
the  German  galleries. 

This  pen  drawing  is  a  reproduction  of  Diirer's 
Missal  of  Maximilian.  That  was  the  first  book 
that  was  produced  by  lithography.  There  are 
many  pages  of  reproductions  of  the  decorations 
of  the  missal,  a  portrait  of  Diirer,  and  other  matter. 

German  artists  in  the  early  days  of  the  last 
century  did  some  extraordinary  work,  but  Senefelder, 


LITHOGRAPHY  221 

as  I  said,  was  not  an  artist,  but  a  clever  business 
man.  His  idea,  in  the  main,  was  not  the  making 
of  works  of  art,  but  of  printing  from  calico,  and  in 
order  to  do  that  he  went  to  that  commercial  nation 
called  Great  Britain,  where  he  thought  he  would 
have  more  success  than  he  would  have  in  Germany. 
He  took  out  patents  for  his  invention  in  his  own 
country  and  England.  But  in  England  he  fell 
among  artists,  and  the  artists  were*  delighted  with 
the  method,  and  among  those  who  practiced  it  were 
West  and  Blake.     And  here  is  a  print  by  Blake. 

The  only  thing  needful  about  lithography  is  that 
you  have  to  know  how  to  draw,  if  you  are  going  to 
make  a  lithograph,  you  have  to  know  how  to  draw 
to  make  even  an  etching  or  a  wood  engraving. 
You  may  not  have  to  do  that  in  order  to  make  an 
oil  painting,  but  you  do  to  make  a  work  of  art. 
In  these  last  days  this  is  not  always  insisted  upon 
by  incompetents  who  cannot  draw. 

Blake  made  this  design,  and  this  one  alone. 
Why  he  made  no  more  I  have  no  idea.  It  is  a 
very  successful  and  characteristic  one.  As  you  will 
see,  all  an  artist's  character  and  technique  come 
out  in  lithograpihy,  because  there  is  no  translation, 
no  reproduction,  no  change.  The  lines  print  as 
the  artist  drew  them. 

A  few  years  afterward — I  think  it  was  about  1816 
— Senefelder  published  his  treatise  on  the  subject, 
The  Grammar  of  Lithography ^  and  that  book  is  the 
authority  to  this  day.  Everything  that  we  know 
about  lithography  is  in  its  pages;  the  only  two 
things  which  have  been  discovered  since  are  the 
application  of  the  steam  press  to  printing  litho- 
graphs, and  photography,  by  which  they  are  at 
times  transferred  to  the  stone. 


222  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

The  art  in  the  beginning  was  not  called  "lithog- 
raphy," but  as  you  see  there,  "stone  printing." 
That  was  not  even  the  original  English  name  for  it. 
It  was  called  the  very  simple  and  compact  one  of 
**polyautography,"  which  did  not  catch  on  very 
well,  but  it  describes  the  art  perfectly — "many  auto- 
writings."  It  is  the  multiplication  of  drawings 
and  writings,  and  not  the  reproduction  of  them,  as 
are  all  the  other  graphic  arts. 

Senefelder,  however,  after  obtaining  his  patent 
and  recognition,  though  he  had  many  difficulties 
and  adventures  in  London,  soon  went  back  to 
Germany. 

This  slide  shows  a  very  curious  plate  by  Samuel 
Prout  (Page  224), published  in  the  English  translation 
of  The  Grammar  of  Lithography  in  1 8 1 8 .  1 1  is  curious 
because  it  shows  the  earliest  method;  it  proves 
that  at  the  beginning  the  drawing  was  not  made  on 
the  stone  but  made  on  paper,  and  transferred  to 
the  stone.  And  Senefelder  himself  says  in  his 
book  that  for  artists  this  is  the  most  valuable 
discovery  in  lithography,  because  the  artist  will 
be  able  to  go  out  of  doors  to  make  his  drawings  on 
paper,  have  them  transferred  to  stone  and  printed 
as  he  could  in  no  other  way.  This  pen  drawing  by 
Prout  was  done  in  that  fashion. 

Almost  immediately  artists  of  eminence  began 
to  take  up  the  art,  and  one  of  the  first  was  Gericault. 
He  was  living  in  London  about  the  time  that  Sene- 
felder was  there,  and  made  this  drawing,  which  was 
one  of  a  series  of  prints  of  the  favorite  form  of 
British  recreation  of  that  day.  That  form  of 
recreation  has  been  transferred  to  this  country,  and 
among  the  greatest  heroes  is  a  gentleman  who 
recently  arrived  in  this  country  from  France  and  is 


■j^...'^..<  f-. 


F.  HANFSTAENGL:   PORTRAIT  OF  SENEFELDER.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  222  SAMUEL  PROUT :  THE  PUMP.  PEN  DRAWING  TRANS- 
FERRED FROM  PAPER  TO  STONE,  PRINTED  IN  SENEFELDER'S 
"GRAMMAR  OF  LITHOGRAPHY."      LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  221       TITLE-PAGE   OF  THE  "GRAMMAR  OF  LITHOGRAPHY' 


PAGE  227      F.  GOYA:   THE  BULL  FIGHT.      LITHOGRAPH 


^^  ■  ■  \^-'':S' '^V^^^^f^-^^^v.^.;:.-  -v.. 


PAGE  228      A.  RAFFET:  ILS  GROGNAIENT  MAIS  ILS  SUIVAIENT  TOU- 
JOURS.      LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  227 

creating  more  interest  than  Maeterlinck  or  Lodge. 
However,  we  will  not  consider  that  matter  of  public 
taste  so  much  as  the  extraordinary  way  in  which 
Gericault  did  this  drawing.  The  upper  part  of  this 
figure  is  done  in  pen  and  ink,  the  legs  and  the  body 
in  chalk,  and  the  reverse  is  the  case  in  the  other 
figure.  This  proves  how  quickly  artists  recognized 
the  possibilities  of  the  art.  The  drawing  was  done  in 
1805  or  1806. 

But  all  artists  who  saw  the  new  form  of  art  began 
to  practice  it,  and  the  portfolios  and  albums  and 
galleries  which  came  out  shortly  afterward  contain 
some  of  the  most  perfect  lithographs,  although  even 
at  that  early  date  some  of  the  artists,  especially 
the  Germans,  began  to  get  that  lithographic  quality 
in  their  drawings  which  we  all  so  hate  and  loathe,  and 
which  you  see  in  the  commercial  lithographs  about 
you — the  perfection  of  technique,  the  destruction 
of  art. 

Lithography  spread  very  rapidly  over  Europe, 
and  got  as  far  as  Spain,  and  Goya,  whose  work  I 
showed  you  last  week  in  aquatint,  made  a  number 
of  lithographs,  finding  it  a  most  congenial  method. 
This  lithograph  (Page  226),  one  of  a  series  of  "Bull 
Fights,"  is  deservedly  famous.  It  was  brought  very 
early  to  this  country,  but  very  little  artistically  was 
done  here. 

Then  the  art  went  back  to  France,  where  two  or 
three  men  began  to  practice  it  with  great  success. 
One  of  them  was  Charlet,  and  this  drawing  (Page 
229)  is  curious,  because  it  shows  another  method  by 
which  a  lithograph  can  be  made.  It  is  evident  that 
the  stone  was  entirely  covered  with  a  film  of  ink,  and, 
if  it  had  been  printed  before  any  drawing  was  put 
on  it,  it  would  have  been  perfectly  black  all  over. 


228  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Charlet  then  either  took  a  scraper  or  a  knife  and 
scraped  the  design  in  white  line  out  of  the  black 
surface  as  the  mezzotinter  does. 

There  is  no  limit  to  the  methods  which  can  be 
employed.  The  number  and  variety  of  them  are 
only  now  just  beginning  to  be  known. 

Another  artist  who  at  the  same  time  began  to 
practice  it  was  Raffet.  And  these  two,  Charlet  and 
Raffet,  invented  between  them  what  is  known  now 
as  the  "Napoleonic  Legend."  Their  stunning  draw- 
ings of  Napoleon  and  the  Napoleonic  Wars  were 
sold  then  as  propaganda  throughout  France,  and 
some  of  them  got  to  England,  and  over  here. 

I  know  of  nothing  finer  in  early  lithographs 
than  this  design  of  Raffet's  of  the  "Nocturnal 
Review." 

There  is  still  another,"The  Retreat  from  Moscow," 
''^Ils grognaient  mais  Us  suivaient toujours''  (Page  226), 
which  is  equally  fine.  And  all  of  these  designs  were 
published  in  very  popular  form  and  sold  for  a  few  sous 
apiece,  and  were  widely  circulated  all  over  Europe. 
They  were  about  a  foot  in  length,  and  were  issued 
a  dozen  or  so  in  a  portfolio. 

But  the  art  was  used  for  other  purposes  than 
popular  propaganda.  An  Englishman  named  Baron 
Taylor  early  in  the  last  century,  about  1825  or 
1830,  went  to  France  and  began  to  publish  an 
illustrated  description  of  the  country,  and  he  got 
the  most  eminent  artists  of  France  and  England  to 
work  for  him.  He  obtained  government  support 
and  began  to  issue  his  Picturesque  France}  One 
of  these  artists  was  Richard  Bonington,  and  Boning- 
ton  made,  in  one  of  the  volumes  of  this  great  work, 

'  Vo^^agti  pittorestjues  tt  romatitir^ues  tie  P ancienne  France. 


PAGE  227  T.  CHARLET:  TIREURS  DE  LA  COMPAGNIE  INFERNALE. 
DRAWING  SCRATCHED  FROM  BLACK  TO  WHITE  LIKE  MEZZOTINT. 
LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  231       R.   BONINGTON:    RUE   DU   GROS-HORLOGE.      LITHO- 
GRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  231 

this  fine  drawing  of  the  "Gros-Horloge"  in  the  street 
atRouen,oneof  the  masterpieces  of  the  art  (Page  230). 

Bonington  experimented  for  himself,  and  in  a 
very  short  time  he  made  a  series  of  drawings  in 
chalk  and  in  wash,  which  have  never  been  surpassed 
to  this  day.  He  was  one  of  the  greatest  of  the 
lithographers,  and  one  of  the  earliest.  As  in  the 
other  forms  of  the  graphic  arts  new  artists  appeared 
with  new  methods. 

Another  man  who  worked  at  the  same  time  as 
Bonington  on  these  volumes  was  Isabey  who  treated 
mainly  the  seaports  of  France  in  the  most  realistic 
fashion.  Not  only  that,  he  made  a  series  of  designs  in 
a  portfolio  of  marine  subjects.  None  of  the  mezzo- 
tints I  showed  you  the  other  day  rivals  this  in  draw- 
ing, in  color,  or  in  handling  (Page  i;}2)-  ^^  ^^  only 
a  small  chalk  drawing,  some  six  or  eight  inches  long, 
but  it  enlarges  wonderfully,  and  gives  you  an  amaz- 
ing effect  of  form,  of  the  movement  of  the  sea,  and 
the  color  of  water  and  sky  done  in  the  simplest  way, 
just  with  a  piece  of  chalk,  the  whole  design  drawn  on 
paper  or  stone.  Probably  this  drawing  was  made 
on  stone,  because  these  artists  made  their  sketches 
out  of  doors,  brought  them  back  to  their  studios,  and 
worked  them  up  on  the  stone,  this  being  the  easiest 
way,  as  the  paper  which  Senefelder  prepared  for 
drawing  on,  was  not  reliable. 

Another  great  man  who  also  practiced  the  art  very 
extensively  was  Daumier.  And  this  design  (Page  233) 
was  published,  I  think,  in  Charivari — I  am  not  certain 
— and  is  one  of  the  episodes  of  the  French  Revolution 
of  1848.  For  making  that  drawing,  which  was  a 
sort  of  satire  on  the  horrors  of  the  Revolution  of  '48, 
Daumier  was  promptly  put  in  prison,  and  when  he 
got  there  he  employed  himself  not  in  weeping  or 


232  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

wailing,  but  in  drawing  portraits  of  his  fellow- 
prisoners.  This  is  about  as  wonderful  a  sample  of 
portrait  design  in  lithography  as  I  know  of,  and 
it  proves  the  fact  that  an  artist  who  is  an  artist  will 
find  his  subjects  always  about  him — whether  in 
prison  or  in  heaven  or  somewhere  else;  all  he  wants 
is  a  sheet  of  paper  and  a  piece  of  lithographic  chalk 
to  prove  it  so. 

A  third  man  who  took  up  the  art  at  this  time 
was  Gavarni.  Gavarni  is  mostly  known  as  a 
draughtsman  of  fashion  and  of  costume  and  events, 
and  this  masque  ball  is  a  good  example  of  his  work. 
But  he  was  not  satisfied  with  that  alone,  and  he 
made  many  portraits  of  many  people,  among 
them  the  De  Goncourt  brothers.  And  besides  that 
he  also  made  a  series  of  portfolios  of  folk-lore,  and 
popular  legends,  and  this  figure,  Pere  Vireloque 
(Page  234),  is  taken  from  one  of  them.  And  I  would 
like  you  to  notice  the  extraordinary  way  that  this 
drawing  on  stone  was  handled,  the  extraordinary 
quality  and  character  that  Gavarni  gets  in  all  of  his 
work,  the  difference  between  the  tottering  creature, 
and  the  firm  ground,  the  handling  and  the  modeling 
of  the  figure.  The  technical  work  is  beyond  belief 
in  the  variety  of  the  textures  that  he  has  got  out  of 
that  stone  or  plate  on  which  the  drawing  was 
made. 

Hervier  made  this  drawing  in  a  different  way  from 
any  other  that  I  have  shown  you.  It  was  made 
entirely  in  wash — for  you  can  work  in  any  way  at 
all,  on  paper  transferred  to  stone,  or  on  the  stone 
itself.  The  wash  is  made  from  the  greasy  chalk 
which  the  artist  uses,  dissolved  in  water  as  you 
dissolve  india  ink  or  solid  water  colors  and  the 
artist  uses  the  dissolved  chalk  like  water  color. 


^^^^'1!^^^ 

\._^^^^^^^:.^                        ^^^^m^^ 

^^^■-  .j:  . 

"'—;;.           "                 !...."" 

PAGE  231       E.  ISABEY:   RETURN  TO  PORT.      LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  231      H.  DAUMIER:   RUEDUTRANSNONAIN.      LITHOGRAPH 


^■^^ 


PAGE  232       A.  GAVARNl :    PERE  VIRELOQUE.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  237      E.  DELACROIX:    THE   LION   OF  THE   ATLAS.      LITHO- 
GRAPH 


PAGE  244      FANTIN-LATOUR :   SYMPHONY.      LITHOGRAPH 


^9P»E5S?3f?!S73n 


PAGE     244        FANTIN-LATOUR :      ROSES.        LITHOGRAPH.        (NOTE 
LINES  IN   DRAWING  PAPER  ON  WHICH  THE  DESIGN  WAS  MADE) 


LITHOGRAPHY  237 

And  it  might  be  just  as  well  if  I  told  you  at  this 
moment  the  theory  of  lithography,  which  I  have 
not  done  yet.  It  is  so  simple,  and  the  drawings  are 
so  easily  made,  that  I  almost  forgot  it.  The  theory 
is  this,  that  if  you  take  a  piece  of  greasy  chalk,  and 
draw  either  on  the  stone,  or  on  paper,  and  transfer  it 
to  stone,  and  then  dampen  that  stone  and  take  some 
more  of  the  greasy  chalk  made  into  ink  with  varnish 
or  oil,  on  a  roller,  very  much  like  the  one  that  I 
showed  you  the  other  day  for  printing  etchings,  for 
inking  the  plates,  and  roll  more  greasy  ink  on  to 
the  dampened  stone,  the  ink  will  only  adhere  to 
the  greasy  drawing  which  is  on  the  stone,  and  the 
water  with  which  the  stone  is  washed  repels  the 
grease,  while  the  grease  attracts  the  ink  (which  is 
also  grease),  and  then  when  the  paper  is  put  on  the 
face  of  it  and  run  through  the  press  the  print  comes  off 
on  the  paper.  The  whole  is  chemical  affinity,  nothing 
else.  It  is  simply  the  affinity  of  grease  for  grease  and 
the  repulsion  of  grease  by  water.  That  is  the  whole 
principle,  and  the  whole  theory,  and  the  whole  prac- 
tice of  the  art. 

It  is  so  simple  that  for  many  years  it  fell  into 
the  hands  of  the  commercial  lithographer,  and  one 
of  the  first  of  these,  although  he  was  a  very  great 
printer,  was  Lemercier,  and  he  did  more  to  advance 
lithography  during  the  middle  of  the  last  century 
than  anyone  else  in  France.  But  he  did  another 
thing:  He  made  a  secret  of  lithography,  invented  all 
sorts  of  mysteries  and  surrounded  the  art  with  them. 
But  in  France  the  artists  continued  to  use  it,  and  this 
"Lion"  of  Delacroix  (Page  235)  is  a  design  that 
justly  ranks  as  a  masterpiece  of  drawing  and  printing. 

Here  is  a  print  by  Linnell,  done  in  England,  show- 
ing quite  clearly  the  difference  between  the  work  of 


238  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  artists  of  the  two  countries.  The  art  migrated 
from  England  to  France  and  back  to  England  again, 
just  as  in  the  case  of  wood  engraving. 

Here  is  a  drawing  by  Cattermole,  a  wash  draw- 
ing which  shows  the  difference  between  English 
and  French  drawing,  when  artists  tried  to  be  them- 
selves and  not  imitate  the  popular  man  of  the 
moment,  as  most  artless  duffers  do  today.  Lane 
was  another  English  artist  and  portrait  painter  who 
practiced  the  art  in  England.  In  those  days  he 
could  get  all  the  sitters  he  wanted  to  pose  for  litho- 
graphed portraits.  But  today  we  have  advanced 
so  far  in  art  that  if  we  want  a  portrait  made — we  go 
to  a  photographer.  Then,  too,  lithography  occupied 
in  the  salons  and  drawing-rooms  the  same  place 
and  the  same  importance  as  bridge.  People  then 
cared  for  art  instead  of  talking  about  it^or  hearing 
it  talked  about. 

But  it  was  treated  in  many  ways.  For  example, 
it  was  used  by  men  who  one  would  not  suppose 
were  caricaturists.  It  was  used  by  Sandys,  whose 
wood  engravings  I  showed  you  in  the  first  lecture. 
Sandys  made  this  extraordinary  pen  drawing,  one  of 
the  finest  that  has  been  done  on  zinc,  and  it  was 
published  as  a  caricature  and  produced  somewhat 
of  a  sensation.  It  may  surprise  you  to  know  that 
he  was  so  absolutely  reckless  that  he  made  a  draw- 
ing on  this  plate;  and  that  it  was  supposed  to 
represent  John  Ruskin  as  the  ass,  and  on  his  back 
are  Millais,  Rossetti,  and  Holman  Hunt,  the  pre- 
Raphaelite  brotherhood,  while  Titian  and  Tintoretti 
you  can  see  in  the  distance  singing  orapro  nobis.  The 
whole  design  was  a  burlesque  on  Millais'  "Sir  Isum- 
bras  at  the  Ford."  And  Ruskin,  the  prophet,  and 
Hunt,  the  serious  one,  got  into  such  a  fury  that  they 


PAGE   243       A.  VON    MENZEL :    THE   GARDEN.       FROM    SKETCHES 
ON   STONE   WITH   CHALK  AND   SCRAPER.      LITHOGRAPH 


I? 


PORTRAIT   DE   FEMME.      LITHO- 


PAGE  245       F.  ROPS :  THE  LACE  EXPERT.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  245       F.  ROPS :   READING  THE  MISSAL.       LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  243 

endeavored  to  prosecute  the  maker  of  it  for  libel,  but 
as  he  was  careful  not  to  sign  his  name  they  did  not 
find  out  for  some  years  who  did  it.  But  techni- 
cally it  was  a  very  remarkable  drawing,  and  it 
lives  because  of  its  excellence,  in  drawing  and 
printing. 

Lithography,  as  I  said,  fell  into  the  hands  of  the 
commercial  lithographer  and  for  years  few  artists 
practiced  it.  But  the  man  who  revived  it  in  Ger- 
many was  Adolph  von  Menzel.  As  I  told  you  of  the 
draughtsmen  on  wood,  all  these  artists  were  so  keen 
for  the  technique  of  any  art  that  they  practiced  every 
form  of  art  which  appeared,  and  Menzel  did  more  in 
Germany  to  make  it  into  an  original  form  of  art  than 
any  who  had  gone  before  him.  Those  drawings 
for  his  volume  on  The  Uniforms  of  Frederick  the 
Great's  Army  were  all  in  pen  and  ink,  and  done  on 
the  stone.  But  he  carried  lithography  farther  than 
anyone  had;  in  this  "Christ  in  the  Temple"  he 
produced  a  masterpiece.  It  has  been  drawn  in 
almost  every  way,  drawn  on  stone,  with  ink  and 
pen,  and  with  wash  and  chalk  all  combined.  I  have 
shown  you  nothing  in  which  such  an  amazing  lot 
of  types  have  been  so  truly  rendered  as  this  litho- 
graph by  Menzel.  I  am  sorry  that  scarcely  any 
of  these  prints  that  I  have  shown  you  are  in  the 
print  room.  They  ought  to  be.  For  you  must  have 
good  examples  to  study  if  you  wish  to  do  good  work, 
and  carry  on  good  tradition. 

Here  is  the  perfection  of  Menzel's  work  (Page  239), 
one  of  a  series  of  designs  he  made  for  a  portfolio 
called  Sketches  with  Chalk  on  Stone.  It  has  all  the 
characteristics,  you  can  see,  of  a  mezzotint,  and  yet 
it  is  a  lithograph.  In  fact  some  of  these  designs  so 
closely  resemble  mezzotints  and  aquatints  that  even 


244  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

this  morning  I  was  shown  in  O'Brien's  place  some 
of  these  early  lithographs  which  I  could  not  tell 
myself,  as  the  plate  marks  were  cut  off,  whether 
they  were  really  lithographs,  as  Mr.  O'Brien  main- 
tained, or  whether  they  were  aquatints.  At  first 
I  thought  they  were  aquatints,  but  they  may  possibly 
be  lithographs,  though  probably  the  artist,  knowing 
about  aquatint,  used  some  form  of  it,  in  some  way, 
on  stone. 

Here  is  another  example  of  modern  German 
work  by  Otto  Fischer.  You  see  again  the  artist 
has  not  lost  a  single  bit  of  character,  the  character 
of  his  handling,  or  his  technique,  or  method  of 
expression.  You  are  not  cramped  in  the  slightest  ') 
in  your  drawing  when  you  make  a  lithograph. 

Here  is  one  by  Otto  Greiner,  done  entirely  in 
pen  and  ink,  a  remarkable  example  of  brilliant 
drawing,  freely  done,  in  which  the  character  of  his 
work  is  perfectly  preserved. 

Another  man  who  took  up  the  art  a  little  later  than 
Menzel  was  Fantin-Latour  (Pages  235  and  236);  he 
practiced  it  for  years,  and  revived  the  art  in  France. 
You  all  know  his  paintings  of  roses  and  his  subject 
pictures,  and  his  lithographs  are  equally  well  known. 
Nothing  could  be  more  beautiful  than  those  roses. 
He  loved  drawing,  and  practiced  lithography  because 
he  loved  it,  because  it  gave  him  line  and  color. 
He  kept  on  for  years,  until  the  close  of  his  life, 
either  working  at  flowers  or  symphonies,  which  he 
rendered  in  lithography,  as  well  as  in  oil. 

There  is  another  thing  about  his  lithographs. 
I  do  not  know  whether  you  can  tell  it  from  this  one, 
but  in  many  of  them  you  can  see  that  these  drawings 
were  made  on  paper,  Michelet  charcoal  paper.  You 
see  the  lines  of  the  paper  and  the  watermark  which 


LITHOGRAPHY  245 

you  find  in  all  Michelet  charcoal  paper  in  the  prints. 
Fantin-Latour  made  all  his  drawings  on  paper,  took 
them  to  the  printer,  ran  them  through  the  printing- 
press,  when  they  came  off  on  the  stone,  and  then 
printed  them  as  Senefelder  did.  You  cannot  make 
any  change  in  the  drawing,  if  you  make  it  on  paper, 
but  you  can  make  any  change  you  want  to  as  soon 
as  it  is  transferred  to  the  stone.  You  can  add  or 
erase  with  perfect  freedom. 

You  remember  I  showed  you  some  of  Felicien 
Rops's  aquatints  the  other  day.  He  was  equally 
remarkable  in  lithography.  He  did  a  vast  number 
of  plates,  and  published  a  remarkable  magazine  some 
forty  or  fifty  years  ago.  Here  are  subjects  (Pages  241 
and  242)  showing  that  he  was  a  perfect  master  of  his 
medium,  able  to  use  it  any  way  he  wanted. 

Henri  De  Groux  was  another  Belgian,  a  mystic 
or  a  "horrorist,"  and,  although  he  died  before  the 
war,  still  he  carried  out  in  some  of  his  works  horrors 
which,  had  he  lived,  he  would  have  seen  his  country 
undergo;  his  country's  misfortunes  might  have  been 
forever  recorded. 

Jean  Francois  Millet  practiced  it  too.  Every 
artist  tried  it.  And  here  you  can  see,  those  of  you 
who  know  his  etchings  and  his  wood  blocks,  how 
freely  and  quickly  and  easily  Millet  worked.  There 
is  no  difficulty  about  lithography  at  all,  except  the 
difficulty  of  drawing;  if  you  can  draw  you  can  litho- 
graph. There  is  no  practice  necessary  at  all,  excepf 
the  endless  practice  that  an  artist  needs  all  his  life 
to  carry  on  to  develop  his  art. 

You  remember  that  "Raven"  by  Manet,  drawn 
in  line,  which  I  showed  you  last  week.  Here  is  a 
portrait  (Page  240)  equally  freely  done,  done  in 
lithography.     It  was   freely  done  with  a  brush — it 


246  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

looks  like  it — with  a  little  bit  of  chalk  work  put  in 
maybe. 

Here  is  another  wash  drawing,  and  a  very  remark- 
able one  by  Lunois.  These  drawings  were  printed 
in  color;  color  can  be  added  to  lithographs;  Sene- 
felder  showed  how  to  do  that,  the  same  way  as  the 
Japanese  made  their  color  blocks,  only  far  more 
directly,  as  there  were  no  wood  blocks  to  cut. 

But  there  is  another  thing  about  lithography 
in  distinction  from  etching  and  engraving.  When 
you  make  an  etching  you  have  no  idea  what  you  are 
going  to  get  until  the  plate  is  printed,  and  then 
you  frequently  get  a  shock.  In  lithography  you  can 
see  everything  you  do  the  whole  while  you  are  doing 
it.  Your  drawing  grows  under  your  fingers  just 
exactly  as  any  other  drawing,  and  you  know  it  will 
print  just  as  you  drew  it,  and  that  is  the  reason 
why  lithography  fell  into  the  hands  of  the  commercial 
lithographer  who  wrapped  it  up  in  mystery  because 
the  technique  was  so  simple,  so  direct,  so  easy  that 
even  he  could  practice  it. 

Those  of  you  who  remember  that  wonderful  study 
upstairs  will  see  that  Carriere  preserved  his  methods 
in  this  print  just  as  much  as  he  has  in  his  paintings. 

Here  is  one  of  Anquetin's  designs,  very  free  and 
bold,  and  yet  done  with  all  the  character  that  he 
would  get  with  his  pen  drawing.  It  is  an  early 
French  poster.  This  head  is  after  Henri  Martin 
(Page  247).  I  imagine  that  the  greater  part  of  that 
was  scratched  out  like  a  mezzotint. 

Here  is  a  reproduction  of  that  great  Rembrandt 
which  was  in  the  Hermitage  at  St.  Petersburg. 
What  has  become  of  it  now?  We  can  only  hope  that 
it  exists.  But  at  any  rate,  we  have  still  wonderful 
reproductions  of  it,  in  this  wonderful  art. 


PAGE  246      HENRI  MARTIN :  THE  VTSION.      LITHOGRAPH  BY  PAUL 
MAUROU 


Qj)  U^  OM- 


PAGE  251       A.  FAVRE :    ON  LES  AURA !       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  251       TH.  STEINLEN:    18  MARS.      LITHOGRAPH 


^*D^^^^ 


PAGE   25 1       J.  L.  FORAIN  :   THE   LETTER.       LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  251 

Steinlen  also  took  up  the  art  (Page  249),  and  in 
his  pages  for  Gil  Bias  Illustre  and  other  magazines 
he  made  a  series  of  drawings  well  worth  study.  You 
must  study  the  work  of  all  these  brilliant  technicians. 

Lithography  was  used  as  war  propaganda, 
in  the  last  war  as  well  as  in  the  time  of  Napoleon. 
You  have  seen  the  French  posters  as  well  as  our  own. 

Forain  and  Steinlen  were  trained  lithographers, 
and  when  war  came  on  they  made  use  of  the  art 
for  the  benefit  of  their  country.  You  will  see  this 
all  through  Forain's  war  work,  and  the  books  that  he 
illustrated  before  the  war  and  in  the  pages  of  Figaro. 

This  is  one  of  Forain's  designs  (Page  250)  done 
during  the  war.  Almost  all  of  his  drawings  that  you 
see  in  Figaro  are  done  with  lithographic  chalk  or  pen 
and  ink.  They  are  made,  as  I  told  you,  into  photo- 
engravings. Abel  Favre  made  the  most  celebrated 
poster  (Page  248)  that  was  done  during  the  war — "On 
les  aura!"  its  meaning  was  plain  to  all  who  could  see. 

^There  is  one  thing  I  want  to  tell  you  about  these 
posters,  and  that  is  that  the  French  artists  who  made 
them  knew  exactly  what  they  were  doing  and  what 
they  wanted  to  do,  because  they  were  technically 
trained  craftsmen. 

The  design  was  made  by  the  artist  not  as  a 
water  color  or  an  oil  painting,  but  as  a  drawing  right 
straight  on  paper  or  on  stone  in  lithographic  chalk — 
if  on  paper,  transferred  to  stone,  or  on  the  stone 
itself.  For  all  those  men  in  England,  in  France,  in 
Italy,  and  also  in  Germany — I  suppose  they  must 
have  had  posters,  although  I  have  not  seen  any  of 
them — knew  absolutely  how  to  work  for  lithographic 
printing. 

Maris  lithographed  his  Dutch  landscapes.  This 
looks  exactly  like  his  wash  or  charcoal  drawing,  but 


252  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

he  has  kept  all  the  character  of  any  of  his  work  in 
other  media. 

Another  man  who  took  up  lithography  was  Bauer 
(Page  16^),  also  a  Dutchman,  who  is  better  known  by 
his  paintings  and  etchings.  Yet  whether  that  Sphinx 
was  done  in  Egypt  or  not,  he  has  made  a  remarkable 
record  of  it.  It  was  also  done  with  remarkable 
technical  knowledge  and  skill. 

Veth,  still  another  Dutchman,  has  used  the 
craft  very  brilliantly.  Here  is  a  portrait  of  the 
reviver  of  lithography,  Menzel,  in  his  old  age. 
Menzel  did  a  considerable  amount  of  work  which  I 
have  not  shown  you,  but  it  is  all  well  worth  study- 
ing, and  reproductions  of  much  of  it  are  in  the 
Ryerson  Library. 

The  third  man  who  took  up  lithography  and 
practiced  it  more  than  Menzel  or  Fantin-Latour 
was  Whistler,  and  this  is  one  of  his  earliest  designs. 
It  was  drawn  on  stone,  because  at  that  time  the 
printer  Way  was  very  anxious  to  get  Whistler,  to 
work  for  him,  and  he  was  good  enough  to  supply 
Whistler  not  only  with  stones,  but  with  wheelbarrows 
and  with  men  to  wheel  them  about,  because  a  stone 
even  a  foot  long,  as  this  is,  and  three  inches  thick, 
weighs  a  lot,  and  the  artist  cannot  very  easily  lug 
it  around.  Whistler  found  this  out  in  his  first 
experiments  after  he  had  made  two  or  three  draw- 
ings on  stone;  this  one  is  done  with  pen,  with  brush, 
and  with  wash. 

From  the  very  beginning  he  began  to  experiment, 
and  experimented  in  many  ways  that  no  one  had 
tried  before  him.  He  found  right  away  that  if  he 
wanted  to  draw  out  of  doors,  as  he  always  did,  from 
nature,  and  did  not  have  his  men  and  his  wheel- 
barrows around,  it  was  impossible,  so  he  began  to 


LITHOGRAPHY  253 

use  paper.  The  paper  that  he  had  at  that  time  was 
horrible  stuff,  and  I  speak  from  a  horrible  experience, 
which  he  had  too.  But  he  mastered  that  paper. 
It  was  covered  with  a  shiny  grain,  and  it  was  a 
nasty  sticky  substance,  and  it  was  one  of  the  most 
difficult  things  in  the  world  to  work  on;  yet  he  made 
on  that  paper  this  charming  design,  one  of  a  number, 
and  this  design  was  published  in  a  paper  called  the 
Whirlwind^  which  was  issued  in  London;  so  little 
was  the  lithograph  cared  for  that  it  was  given  away, 
not  as  the  Japanese  color  prints  I  told  you  about  the 
other  day  with  a  pound  of  tea,  from  which  Whistler 
learned  about  the  nocturnes,  but  they  could  not 
give  this  paper  containing  Whistler's  prints  away; 
it  was  sold  as  waste  paper.  And  now  collectors 
give  pounds  to  get  that  very  drawing,  when  they 
can  find  it — a  drawing  they  would  not  have  when 
he  made  it,  though  it  used  to  sell  for  a  penny. 

Whistler  knew  that  his  lithographs  had  the  same 
artistic  value  as  his  etchii^gs.  He  devoted  the 
same  care  and  skill  to  them,  but  people  thought 
otherwise  at  that  time,  but  now  they  have  come 
around  to  his  way  of  thinking. 

This  drawing  of  Stephane  Mallarme  was  done 
on  another  kind  of  paper,  on  smooth  Japanese 
transfer  paper.  I  happened  to  be  with  him  when  he 
made  it.  And  although  that  drawing  looks  as 
though  it  were  knocked  right  off — the  drawing  itself, 
when  he  got  it  right  did  not  take  very  long — he  put 
piece  of  transfer  paper  over  transfer  paper,  tore 
them  up,  and  started  afresh  and  all  the  while  he 
kept  poor  Mallarme  posing,  and  he  kept  on  for  two 
or  three  weeks  until  he  got  this  remarkable  por- 
trait, which  was  published  as  the  frontispiece  of 
Mallarme's  volume  of  verse. 


254  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Whistler  experimented  in  all  sorts  of  ways,  and 
with  all  sorts  of  subjects.  As  he  used  to  say,  he  was 
no  landscape  painter  or  portrait  painter  or  figure 
painter,  but  he  was  an  artist.  He  said  "the  man 
who  cannot  draw  or  paint  everything,  cannot  draw  or 
paint  anything,"  and  he  proved  the  truth  of  his 
proposition  by  this  study  of  a  shoeing  forge,  drawn 
as  well  as  any  man  could  who  devotes  himself  to 
the  study  of  horses.  That  was  done  on  paper — 
the  greater  number  of  his  lithographs  are  on  paper. 
Many  of  his  drawings  were  made  in  Paris,  and  when 
finished  the  sheet  of  paper  was  sent  over  to  London 
to  his  printer.  Way,  and  there  put  down  on  the  stone. 

But  you  must  know  at  this  time  the  secrecy  in 
the  art  of  lithography  was  so  great  that  Whistler, 
during  the  whole  of  his  lifetime,  had  no  idea  how 
drawings  were  put  on  to  the  stone,  or  how  they  were 
etched,  or  printed.  The  etching  is  nothing  but 
washing  the  stone  with  acid  to  keep  the  lines  from 
spreading.  s 

But  the  drawing  made  on  paper  was  sent  over  to 
London,  and  then  transferred  to  the  stone,  and 
when  it  was  put  on  the  stone,  sometimes  half  the 
work  was  lost,  and  Whistler  had  to  go  to  London, 
get  the  stone,  and  draw  on  it  again  the  work  which 
the  printer  had  lost,  in  order  to  get  the  effect 
that  he  had  in  the  beginning  on  paper.  Had  he 
been  allowed  to  go  into  the  printing  office  and  see 
the  drawing  transferred,  etched,  and  printed,  we 
should  have  had  more  lithographs  and  even  better 
lithographs  than  we  have  today  from  him.  These 
hindrances  drove  him  and  many  other  artists  from 
lithography. 

Finally  some  of  us  broke  open  the  door  of 
the  lithograph  shops  and  we  found  that  the  secret 


LITHOGRAPHY  255 

of  lithography  consisted  mostly  of  stale  beer  and 
lemon  juice,  conservatism,  and  stupidity.  It  was 
with  such  secrets  that  the  craft  was  surrounded. 
And  it  is  in  ways  of  this  sort  that  most  of  the 
secrets  of  the  arts  are  hidden. 

There  are  several  architectural  subjects  by 
Whistler,  astounding  studies  of  architecture  done 
by  him  a  little  before  he  died.  Look  at  the  wonder- 
ful way  the  "Church  of  St.  Anne's,"  that  old 
Georgian  church  in  Soho,  is  drawn  and  the  feeling 
of  a  dreary,  dark  day  given.  I  remember  the  after- 
noon he  came  into  my  place  and  said  he  had  seen 
the  subject,  and  in  about  two  hours  he  was  back  with 
the  drawing  on  a  piece  of  paper.  He  had  gone  out, 
done  the  whole  thing,  and  that  same  afternoon  we 
went  over  to  the  printer's  and  it  was  put  on  a  stone 
and  printed.  As  I  shall  show  you  on  Thursday, 
a  lithograph  can  be  made  more  rapidly  than  an 
etching. 

Here  is  a  portrait  he  made  of  me,  in  a  very  short 
time,  the  result  of  a  lifetime  of  practice  (Page  257). 
As  I  sat  in  a  chair  in  front  of  the  fire  in  my  place 
in  London,  and  he  sat  on  the  floor  with  his  back  to 
the  fire  and  worked  until  he  could  scarcely  see,  so 
great  was  the  darkness,  yet  he  kept  the  feeling  of 
firelight  in  the  coming  twilight  in  a  most  remarkable 
fashion.  He  kept  on  working  till  he  could  scarcely, 
see,  for  he  used  to  say  there  is  so  much  to  do,  and  so 
little  time  to  do  it. 

This  is  one  of  the  last,  if  not  the  last,  of  the  plates 
he  did.  It  was  done  under  most  trying  circum- 
stances— when  his  wife  was  ill — in  the  Savoy  Hotel, 
looking  out  of  the  window  across  the  Thames; 
it  is  the  most  perfect  of  the  wash  drawings  he  did. 
It  was  all  done  in  wash,  exactly  as  a  water  color,  on 


256  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  stone,  not  transferred  to  it,  and  it  was  scraped 
and  burnished  and  then  redrawn  over  and  over 
again  until  he  got  the  effect  he  wanted.  But  it 
was  not  done  easily  or  quickly  or  simply.  There  is 
very  much  work  on  the  stone,  for  the  first  proofs  were 
very  poor  indeed,  black  and  smeared,  though  he 
never  was  daunted  by  that,  but  kept  on  with  his 
work  until  he  got  the  result  that  he  wanted;  and 
out  of  this  plate  he  made  one  of  his  finest  lithographs. 

Sargent  has  made  a  few  lithographs.  This 
was  done  on  paper.  And  I  have  often  wondered 
why  he  has  not  done  more,  because  in  the  first 
and  almost  the  only  design  he  ever  made,  he  made  a 
great  success.  And  I  cannot  help  wondering,  as 
I  said  a  little  while  ago,  why  people  who  want  their 
portraits  drawn  do  not  get  an  artist  to  do  it  in 
lithography.  As  I  have  shown  you,  it  is  a  most 
beautiful  form  of  art,  and  here  is  a  proof  that  any- 
one who  can  draw,  as  Sargent  can,  can  make  a 
fine  lithograph  on  his  first  attempt.  F.  Walter 
Taylor  is  beginning  to  do  portraits,  and  I  hope  he 
may  go  on. 

Beardsley,  too,  is  another  example  of  a  man  who 
worked  in  all  sorts  of  media,  and  these  posters  by 
him  are  as  fine  as  anything  that  he  did  (Page  298). 

Here  is  another,  done  in  blue  and  white,  nothing 
else.  And  the  theater  poster  was  the  success  of  a 
London  season,  more  of  a  success  than  the  play  was. 

Another  man  who  took  it  up  in  England  is 
William  Rothenstein.  And  here  are  portraits  of  two 
English  artists  (Page  258),  both  of  whom  have  done 
important  work  in  lithography.  I  am  sorry  I  have 
not  slides  by  them.  They  work  together,  but  their 
work  is  along  different  lines;  Shannon  does  romantic 
compositions,   and   Ricketts  has   taken,  to  a  great 


PAGE  255      J.  A.  MC  N.  WHISTLER :   PORTRAIT  OF  JOSEPH  PENNELL. 
LITHOGRAPH 


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^"'^fe^ 


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PAGE  256      W.  ROTHENSTEIN:   PORTRAIT  OF  CHARLES  RICKETTS 
AND  C.  H.  SHANNON.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  261       F.  BRANGWYN  :    PORTERS.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  261       MUIRHEAD  BONE:  THE  SHIPYARD.      LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  261 

extent  to  making  theatrical  posters,  lils:e  Beardsley — 
however,  in  his  own  way. 

This  is  a  portrait  of  Mr.  George  Bernard  Shaw. 
It  is  better  looking  than  Mr.  Shaw  is  now,  and  it  is 
rather  a  good  design  by  Rothenstein.  I  wonder  that 
Shaw  has  not  taken  to  lithography  himself.  He  has 
tried  everything  and  succeeded  in  a  few  things, 
especially  in  advertising. 

Brangwyn  (Page  259)  also  has  done  a  great  deal  in 
lithography.  And  all  the  men  whose  work  I  am  now 
going  to  show  you  are  artists  who  have  been  trained 
in  lithography. 

When  it  was  found  at  the  beginning  of  the  war 
that  we  had  not  an  artist  in  the  United  States  of 
America  who  was  able  to  make  marine  subjects  in 
lithography,  the  government  had  to  send  to  Europe, 
to  London,  to  have  a  drawing  made  which  would 
print.  Nobody  knew  how  to  do  it  here,  in  this 
highly  enlightened  country  of  ours  which  is  full  of 
artists.  The  government  could  not  get  an  artist 
who  could  make  a  marine  drawing  which  could  be 
put  on  the  stone  and  printed  at  once.  So  they  had 
to  send  to  London  to  have  the  drawing  made  by  an 
Englishman,  and  that  drawing  was  sent  here  in  a 
British  dispatch  box,  and  was  put  on  the  stone 
by  the  American  Lithographing  Company,  and 
prints  were  made  of  it  in  a  few  hours  after  it  arrived. 

There  is  an  example  of  our  utter  unpreparedness 
in  art  when  we  went  into  the  war. 

There  were  a  number  of  other  Englishmen  who 
took  up  lithography  as  propaganda  work,  and  here  is 
a  design  by  one  of  them,  Muirhead  Bone  (Page  260), 
a  most  original  design,  in  composition  and  arrange- 
ment. The  top  of  this  great  crane  looks  down  on  a 
shipyard.     Before    the    war    Bone    had    not   made 


262  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

a  single  lithograph.  He  took  up  the  art  and  made  a 
success  of  it,  and  did  a  great  service  to  his  country. 

But  at  the  same  time  he,  and  I  believe  all  the 
other  men,  went  to  the  printer's  and  saw  that  the 
drawing  was  properly  put  on  the  stone  and  properly 
printed.  And  that  is  what  scarcely  anyone  takes 
the  trouble  to  do  in  this  country.  Most  of  you 
students  are  afraid  of  soiling  your  lily-white  hands. 

During  the  war  we  artists  who  were  connected 
with  the  Bureau  of  Public  Information,  the  Pictorial 
Division,  had  about  five  hundred  painters  and 
illustrators  working  for  us,  and  do  you  know,  out 
of  that  five  hundred  there  were  not  five  Americans 
who  knew  how  to  make  a  lithograph  at  all,  or  even 
how  to  make  a  drawing  which  did  not  have  to  be 
copied,  redrawn,  or  photographed.  This  technical 
ignorance  was  an  enormous  loss  of  time  in  govern- 
ment propaganda,  and  an  enormous  waste  of  gov- 
ernment money,  because  all  the  work  that  these 
untrained  patriots  did  had  to  be  done  over.  You 
had  a  most  excellent  Division  here  in  Chicago,  but 
scarcely  a  man  knew  how  to  make  his  drawings. 

This  design  (Page  162))  also  a  war  drawing,  is  by 
Spencer  Pryse.  It  was  made  on  a  zinc  plate,  as  I  re- 
member, and  he  proved  it  and  printed  it  and  saw  to  the 
whole  thing.  And  unless  you  students  care  enough 
about  your  art  to  do  that,  to  care  for  your  drawings 
and  print  them,  when  you  get  a  lithograph  press,  the 
sooner  you  get  out  of  art  into  something  else,  the 
better  it  will  be  for  yourselves;  art  can  get  on  very 
well  without  you. 

Another  English  war  artist  was  Nevinson  (Page 
264).  These  drawings,  as  I  understand,  were  not 
done  at  the  front,  because  no  artist  did  anything  im- 
mediately at  the  front,  for  there  was  nothing  there  to 


PAGE  262       SPENCER  PRYSE :    BELGIUM.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  262       C.  W.  NEVINSON :   THE  ROAD.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  252       MARIUS  A.  F.  BAUER:   THE  SPHINX.       LITHOGRAPH 


-b 


'">! 


>»« 


BOOKS 

WANTED 

FOB.  OUR  A4EN 
JN  CAtAP  AND, 

OVER  THERE 

TAKE  YOtm  GWTS  TO 
THE  POBUC  UBRAFY 


PAGE  271       C.  B.  FALLS :    POSTER.       LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  267 

do,  nothing  to  do  but  to  keep  your  head  under  cover. 
When  you  got  to  the  front,  as  I  saw  it,  there  was 
nothing  to  see  and  if  you  stuck  your  head  up  you 
might  lose  it.  But  most  of  these  British  drawings 
were  done  some  five  or  ten  miles  behind  the  lines. 

There  was  another  thing  about  this  British 
propaganda  work.  Do  you  know  that  the  British 
and  the  French  governments  did  more  for  their 
artists  over  here  than  we  did  for  ours?  The  best 
of  the  work  that  was  done  was  sent  over  here  to 
show  what  Great  Britain  was  doing.  The  United 
States  government  did  not  have  enough  knowledge  of 
how  to  exploit  itself  to  send  the  work  that  we  did  even 
around  this  country.  None  of  it  but  some  of  my 
own  ever  got  to  Europe  during  the  war;  it  has 
not  got  over  there  yet.  And  that  is  altogether 
due  to  the  fact  that  we  have  no  art  head,  no  art 
direction,  no  Secretary  of  Art,  no  Art  Department 
in  the  United  States.  And  I  hope  that  before  we 
go  into  another  war,  before  we  do  anything  more, 
we  will  have  an  Art  Department  in  this  country. 
We  must  have  it.  We  are  bound  to  have  it.  Or  we 
have  got  to  give  up  talking  about  art,  because 
we  are  rapidly  becoming,  owing  to  the  want  of 
government  protection  of  art,  one  of  the  most 
artless  countries  on  the  face  of  the  earth.  The 
government  thinks  art  a  luxury — it  is  a  financial 
asset. 

Only  today,  I  believe,  there  is  a  committee  or  a 
commission  in  Chicago  begging  for  funds  to  start, 
in  the  American  Academy  in  Rome,  a  department 
of  music.  Is  it  not  a  pretty  spectacle "  for  the 
United  States,  when  the  American  Academy,  so- 
called,  of  Fine  Arts  in  Rome,  and  of  Archeology  and 
Classical  Studies  has  to  send  private  people  out  to 


268  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

beg  for  money,  that  we  ought  to  be  able  to  demand 
from  the  state!  The  state  should  furnish  that 
money,  and  should  support  that  Academy.  We 
have  a  very  fine  Academy  in  Rome,  just  as  the 
French  have  an  Academy  and  as  the  Spaniards  and 
the  English  have.  But  the  Spanish  public  and  the 
French  public  are  not  asked  to  support  their  acade- 
mies. The  governments  pay  for  them,  because  they 
know  that  art  is  a  financial  asset,  as  important  as 
big  business  and  a  great  deal  more  so.  We  don't 
know  enough  to  know  how  little  we  do  know. 

Another  thing  is  that,  although  in  our  Academy 
we  are  now  to  have  all  the  branches  of  the  fine  arts, 
there  is  one  that  we  are  not  to  have,  the  most  impor- 
tant of  all,  the  one  in  which  this  country  has  made 
the  greatest  name,  and  that  is  the  practice  and 
teaching  of  the  graphic  arts.  Every  other  country 
has  in  its  academy  a  school  of  graphic  arts.  We  have 
not.  And  yet  it  is  in  the  graphic  arts  that  the 
United  States  has  done  its  best  work,  as  I  think 
you  will  admit  after  seeing  a  good  many  of  these 
slides.  Until  we  get  a  school  of  graphic  arts  we 
are  simply  out  of  competition  with  other  countries. 

And  there  is  another  matter.  The  pupils  for 
the  French  Academy  in  Rome  are  obtained  in  this 
way:  In  France  there  are  government  art  schools 
in  all  the  big  provincial  towns.  And  from  those 
art  schools  the  best  pupils  are  sent  to  Paris  to  study 
in  the  Ecole  des  Beaux  Arts.  And  they  have  all  in 
their  heads  the  hope  that  they  may  win  the  Prix  de 
Rome;  when  they  have  got  that,  they  pass  four 
delightful  years  in  Rome  putting  what  they  have 
learned  into  practice.  We  have  no  such  schools. 
If  a  man  does  win  the  American  prize,  a  student- 
ship in  the  American  Academy,  he  wins  it  simply 


PAGE  272      JOSEPH  PENNELL:  DOORWAY,  ROUEN.      LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  271       GEORGE  BELLOWS :   THE  MURDER  OF  EDITH  CAVELL. 
LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  271 

without  any  tradition,  without  any  definite  system 
of  teaching,  only  because  he  can  pass  a  certain 
examination.  And  the  best  craftsman,  the  most 
useful  artist  or  art  student,  has  but  little  chance 
to  win. 

It  is  the  duty  of  this  country  to  organize  national 
schools  in  every  great  city  in  the  land.  We  should 
have  in  Washington  a  great  national  art  university, 
and  from  that  national  art  university  the  best 
students  should  be  sent  by  the  government  to  Rome 
or  Paris  or  the  most  inspiring  centers  of  art  work, 
and  then  we  will  get  some  national  art,  and  we 
won't  get  it  in  any  other  way. 

One  man,  however,  who  did  work  intelligently 
for  the  government  was  this  artist,  Charles  Falls, 
and  another  was  Adolph  Treidler,  both  Chicago 
men  whom  you  never  had  the  sense  to  appreciate, 
as  I  told  you  when  I  showed  you  one  of  Falls's 
drawings  last  week.  This  was  the  most  popular 
American  poster  (Page  iGG)^  I  believe,  that  was  made 
during  the  war,  or  one  of  them,  and  one  of  the  most 
artistic  ones — at  any  rate,  one  of  the  most  effective. 
And  it  was  made  by  a  man  who  knew  how  to  make 
posters,  and  who  trained  himself  to  make  them — 
trained  himself  by  working  in  a  shop,  and  that  is  the 
reason  why  the  poster  was  so  good,  so  effective,  and 
had  such  a  very  satisfactory  result  when  books  were 
wanted. 

Here  is  the  work  of  another  man  who  also  has 
given  much  time  to  practical  lithography,  setting  up 
a  press  for  himself— Mr.  Bellows  (Page  270),  who  was 
here  during  the  winter.  He  has  carried  out  that  study 
of  the  "Murder  of  Edith  Cavell"  in  a  remarkable 
fashion,  though  as  he  did  not  see  it  I  rather  prefer 
this  second  slide,  in  which  he  has  drawn  something 


272  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

that  he  has  seen;  I  think  this  is  a  finer  rendering  of 
something  that  he  has  seen,  than  the  other,  which  he 
has  imagined.  These  two,  however,  are  very  inter- 
esting Hthographs,done  by  a  very  amusing  man. 

And  a  propos  of  this  I  show  you  this  print  for 
another  reason.  It  is  a  drawing  I  made  in  Venice  in 
1 91 2 — this  is  only  the  key  block  of  it — -which  the 
Venetian  government  used  as  a  poster.  But  what 
I  wanted  to  tell  you  about  it  was  that  the  drawing 
was  made  from  nature  in  Venice,  taken  to  London 
and  put  on  stone  without  anybody  working  on  it 
except  myself,  and  then  transferred  again;  that  is, 
a  copy  of  it  was  printed  with  very  greasy  ink,  and 
then  it  was  packed  up  and  sent  to  Italy  and  printed 
there.  No  other  artist,  no  engraver,  no  photog- 
rapher, had  anything  to  do  with  it — the  drawing  as  I 
made  it  printed. 

Here  is  another.  This  was  one  of  the  first 
drawings  that  was  made  on  paper  and  transferred 
to  stone  in  modern  times  and  the  original  kept. 
It  is  transferred  extremely  well  technically,  and  I 
want  to  show  you  next  week  exactly  how  that  is 
done.  That  was  transferred  and  printed  by  Charles 
Goulding,  the  brother  of  the  etching  printer  in 
London. 

This  is  the  shop  in  which  I  work  (Page  286).  It  is 
not  so  bad.  And  I  work  with  that  printer  who 
stands  beside  me.  You  can  see  the  type  he  is  and 
the  nationality  he  is.  And  every  workman,  almost, 
in  that  shop  is  a  German,  and  they  have  been  there 
for  years;  they  were  there  all  through  the  war, 
though  most  of  them,  I  suppose  all  of  them,  or 
nearly  all  of  them,  are  American  citizens.  But  there 
is  not  in  that  shop,  or  there  was  not  before  the 
war,  scarce  an  American-born  lithographic  prover  or 


LITHOGRAPHY  273 

artist,  because  there  is  not  a  single  craft  school, 
except  one  in  Cincinnati,  where  the  art  of  lithography 
is  taught  — the  simplest  art  in  the  world — and  yet 
there  is  nobody  who  has  taken  the  trouble  in  this 
country  to  try  to  learn  it,  and  we  have  to  import 
nearly  all  the  trained  lithographers  that  we  have. 

These  are  two  forms  of  presses  which  are  pro- 
ducing in  this  country  the  most  amazing  results. 
They  are  making  really  a  new  epoch  and  a  new 
era  in  lithography.  I  said  that  everything  was  in 
Senefelder's  book,  but  this  is  the  latest  method  of 
work.  The  drawing  is  put  on  this  flat  bed,  and 
runs  under  this  cylinder  which  is  covere'd  with  a 
rubber  blanket,  and  the  rubber  blanket  takes  the 
impression  and  transfers  it  on  to  the  paper  which 
is  upon  the  press.  The  same  way,  more  or  less, 
in  the  other.  That  is  what  is  known  as  the  offset 
method,  a  method  which  is  going  to  produce  in 
the  very  near  future  a  great  revolution  in  lithog- 
raphy. But  I  hope  I  have  shown  you  in  this  talk 
what  wonderful  work  has  been  done,  and  next 
week  I  want  to  show  you  exactly  how  it  is  done, 
and  how  simple  it  is,  and  I  hope  that  in  the  future 
some  of  you  will  take  it  up. 


THE  PRINTERS.      LITHOGRAPH 


#/->> 


iikirk 


LITHOGRAPH  PRESS 

THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS  LITHOGRAPHY 
THE  METHODS  SIXTH  LECTURE  THURS- 
DAY   APRIL   22    1920 

MR.  EGGERS:  I  wanted  particularly  to  say 
a  word  in  connection  with  this  program, 
because  a  proposition — I  might  almost  have 
said  at  one  time  a  dream — which  we  have  had  in  mind 
at  the  Art  Institute  seems  to  be  approaching  realiza- 
tion. Mr.  Pennell  is  only  one  of  those  who  have 
urged  doing  things  which  are  practical,  doing  things 
which  are  more  and  more  practical  at  the  Institute 
than  the  things  which  we  have  been  doing,  and 
among  these  more  practical  realizations  of  the  art 
ideal  is  the  development  of  a  class  in  lithography. 
Through  the  generous  co-operation  of  the  National 
Association  of  Employing  Lithographers,  the  Art 
Institute  is  going  to  be  able  within  a  very  few  days, 
I  trust,  to  announce  a  class  for  the  training  of  workers 
in  lithography. 

There  will  be  two  phases  to  that  work.  There 
is  one  which  is  distinctly  an  economic  phase.  The 
country  needs  lithographers.     It  is  willing  to  give 


276  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

them  occupation.  It  is  willing  to  pay  them  well. 
In  other  words,  the  technical  lithographer  is  a  man 
who  earns  a  good  living  and  is  sure  of  a  job. 

The  other  phase  is  that  in  lithography  we  have 
a  means  of  conveying  to  a  large  public  the  direct 
touch  of  the  artist  in  a  work  of  art  as  we  do  not 
convey  it  by  any  other  form  of  reproduction,  with 
the  exception,  of  course,  of  etching  and  wood-block 
printing. 

The  lithograph  is  in  a  certain  sense  an  autograph. 
It  is  a  comparatively  young  art,  but  already  illustri- 
ous names  like  Whistler's,  Mr.  Pennell's  own,  the 
name  of  Bellows,  Sterner,  men  of  that  type,  have 
been  enrolled  as  great  masters  of  that  art,  and 
they  have  given  that  art  a  great  impetus. 

It  is  a  great  pleasure  to  introduce  this  afternoon's 
program  in  which  we  shall  have  a  practical  demon- 
stration of  various  practices  of  lithography. 

MR.  PENNELL:  I  think  this  announcement 
by  Mr.  Eggers  is  most  important,  for  it  does  show 
what  some  of  us  have  been  trying  to  insist  on,  that 
what  is  wanted  in  this  country  are  practical  technical 
schools,  and  if  you  make  a  start,  as  you  are  going 
to  make  here  by  a  School  of  Lithography,  you  will 
have  done  a  great  deal  for  the  country,  for  the 
Institute  and  for  the  students,  and  the  last  should 
be  first.  My  belief  is  this,  and  I  know  it  is  a  prac- 
tical belief,  and  I  have  said  that  I  do  not  believe 
there  is  a  single  budding  Rembrandt  or  Michelangelo, 
or  Whistler,  or  unseen  genius  in  this  audience.  I 
do  not  believe  any  one  of  you  is  going  to  turn  out  to 
be  anything  of  the  sort.  Yet  some  of  you  may. 
That  will  be  because  you  cannot  be  stopped.  But 
there  is  no  reason  why  every  student  in  this  school 
should  not  learn   some  craft  by  which,  until  you 


LITHOGRAPHY  277 

become  great  artists,  you  can  live.  No  matter 
how  great  you  may  become,  you  are  not  going 
straight  to  the  top  of  the  tree  or  the  summit  of  the 
mountain  of  fame.  You  will  have  to  do  a  lot  of 
climbing,  and  the  easier  you  make  that  climbing 
for  yourselves,  or  the  easier  it  is  made  for  you,  the 
better.  And  if  as  in  climbing  you  have  a  rope — a 
craft — to  hang  on  to,  the  better  it  will  be  for  you. 

There  is  one  other  thing  I  want  to  say,  and  it  is 
that  many  of  the  most  distinguished  artists  in  this 
country  have  started  as  lithographers,  and  I  can 
give  you  their  names.  One  of  the  most  brilliant 
was  John  H.  Twachtman.  Some  of  his  pictures  are 
upstairs  in  the  galleries.  Twachtman  was  trained 
as  a  working  lithographer.  So  were  Shirlaw,  Diel- 
man,  Muhrmann,  and  many  others.  Most  of 
them  learned  their  craft  in  the  lithographic  shop 
of  Strowbridge  &  Company  in  Cincinnati.  They 
made  and  saved  enough  money  to  go  to  Europe  and 
study  their  art.  You  are  studying  art  here;  you 
have  scholarships  to  depend  on,  but  you  have  no 
craftsmanship — those  men  of  a  past  generation  made 
names  for  themselves  by  themselves — -you  have 
every  sort  of  help,  denied  them,  but  you  have  yet 
to  make  a  reputation  as  they  did.  That  is  the 
aim  of  all  artists. 

Probably  the  greatest  artist  that  America  has 
produced,  and  who  stayed  over  here  and  did  not 
go  to  Europe  to  live  was  Winslow  Homer.  I  do  not 
know  to  what  extent  Winslow  Homer  worked  at 
lithography,  but  he  knew  the  art  of  lithography,  and 
he  fell  back  on  it  when  he  wanted  to  publish  some 
of  his  drawings. 

The  most  interesting  thing  that  I  have  heard 
since  I  have  been  here  is  the  announcement  of  the 


278  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

starting  of  this  school  of  Hthography  by  Mr.  Eggers. 
1  am  extremely  glad  that  it  is  to  be  started.  And  you 
are  greatly  indebted  to  the  Art  Institute  of  Chicago 
which  is  now  going  to  take  up  practical  work,  and 
it  will  be  your  privilege  to  assist  by  practical  study, 
and  then  you  will  find  that  you  will  get  practical 
returns  from  it.  It  is  not  going  to  interfere  with 
your  art  work,  but  it  is  going  to  enable  you  to  make 
a  livelihood  out  of  your  art,  and  you  have  to  make  a 
living,  most  of  you,  I  hope.  If  you  can  do  it  in 
an  artistic  fashion,  it  is  one  of  the  greatest  advan- 
tages that  you  can  have  had  from  your  school 
training. 

Now,  to  come  to  practical  work.  I  told  you  the 
other  day  that  when  Senefelder  invented  lithography 
he  had  two  things  in  mind:  One  was  the  printing  of 
his  plays  and  music  in  some  simpler  and  cheaper 
form  than  by  engraving  on  copper.  The  other 
was  calling  the  attention  of  artists  to  the  new  craft. 
Mr.  Eggers  made  one  mistake  in  his  most  important 
announcement  today,  though  he  did  try  to  correct 
himself,  when  he  said  that  lithography  was  a  form 
of  reproduction  like  etching  or  wood  engraving.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  nothing  of  the  sort.  It  is  not 
a  reproductive  art.  It  is  the  art  of  multiplication, 
while  all  the  other  graphic  arts,  as  I  have  been  telling 
you  for  the  last  five  lectures,  are  reproductive  arts. 
Lithography  is  the  art  of  multiplying  originals  and 
not  of  reproducing  them. 

Drawings  from  the  beginning  of  lithography  were 
made  by  artists  on  paper  or  on  stone.  Senefelder 
was  always  trying  to  get  some  substitute  for  the 
heavy  stone,  and  his  first  attempt,  and  successful 
attempt,  more  or  less,  was  in  making  what  he  called 
"stone  paper."     That  was  a  sort  of  paper  which 


LITHOGRAPHY  279 

was  coated  with  powdered  stone,  and  this  gave  a 
grain  to  the  drawing  made  on  it.  It  was  not  a 
success,  though  used  for  a  while. 

And  the  next  thing  he  tried  was  metal  plates. 
I  am  not  certain  to  what  extent  he  succeeded,  but, 
as  I  showed  you  last  time,  most  of  the  early  litho- 
graphs were  copies  done  in  the  artist's  studio  or  in 
the  printing-office,  and  stones  were  used  for  two 
reasons:  Because  the  artist  did  not  have  to  take 
them  out  of  doors,  and  also  because  when  you 
make  a  drawing  on  stone  or  on  a  metal  plate,  you 
know  what  you  are  doing,  and  the  design  so  made 
should  print. 

There  is  this  difference  between  lithography  and 
the  other  graphic  arts.  When  you  make  an  etching, 
as  I  think  I  told  you  last  week,  but  it  is  worth 
repeating — you  first  draw  on  the  zinc  or  copper 
plate,  but  that  is  not  the  etching,  not  the  end;  you 
must  bite  the  drawing  and  print  it.  In  lithography 
the  drawing  that  you  make  on  the  paper,  on  the 
plate  of  zinc,  or  on  stone,  you  will  see — or  you 
should,  if  it  comes  off — comes  out  as  a  print  exactly 
as  you  drew  it.  It  is  not  reproduced,  or  changed, 
it  is  multiplied. 

The  first  thing  to  do  in  making  a  lithograph  is  to 
prepare  the  zinc  plate.  That  is  a  simple  matter. 
But  everything  about  lithography  is  simple.  It  has 
only  been  made  complicated  by  people  who  want 
to  wrap  it  in  mystery,  and  in  unionism,  and  various 
things  of  that  sort,  which  you  artists  will  find  are 
not  absolutely  necessary  to  good  work. 

But  again,  as  in  all  other  arts,  you  have  to  know 
how  to  draw. 

The  first  thing  is  to  prepare  the  plate  by  polishing 
or  graining  it,  and  then  to  draw  on  it.      You  see 


280  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  drawing  which  has  been  made  on  it.  Then  the 
printer  dampens  the  plate  with  water  in  a  sponge.  I 
would  not  have  done  it  that  way.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary. But  he  is  doing  it  in  his  way.  He  wants  to 
clean  the  plate,  to  get  the  surplus  chalk  of  the 
drawing  off  the  surface  of  the  plate.  I  know  it 
should  be  left  there,  as  it  gives  richness  to  the 
prints. 

After  he  has  finished  washing  the  drawing,  if 
anything  is  left  of  it — he  has  smeared  it  already — 
he  will,  I  believe — everybody  has  his  own  way — 
wash  it  with  gum  arable  and  water,  and  gum  arable 
is  supposed  to  be  one  of  the  most  vital  and  important 
and  necessary — it  is  necessary — adjuncts  to  lithog- 
raphy. The  gum  arable  protects  the  design,  keeps 
it  from  spreading,  and  also  in  a  way  etches  it — 
what  I  have  told  you  about  etching  lines  into  a 
plate  or  etching  away  the  undrawn  parts  of  it — as  in 
etching  or  photo-engraving — is  not  done  in  lithog- 
raphy at  all.  In  this,  as  you  see,  there  is  no  etching 
of  lines  into  the  plate,  or  leaving  them  in  relief.  The 
whole  is  done  on  the  surface  by  chemical  affinity. 
And  the  theory  and  the  practice  is  this:  The  chalk 
with  which  this  drawing  is  made  is  composed  of 
grease  and  coloring  matter,  and  grease  attracts 
grease  and  repels  water.  The  printer  now  covers 
the  whole  plate  with  ink,  which  is  only  the  chalk 
dissolved  by  having  some  oil  mixed  with  it,  in 
order  that  he  can  use  it  on  the  roller.  He  let 
the  plate  dry  so  the  ink  sticks  to  it  all  over. 

He  is  doing  it  in  his  own  way,  and  that  is  not 
my  way,  but  I  have  no  doubt  he  will  succeed  quite 
as  well  as  I  would.  He  rolls  the  ink  all  over  the  plate 
to  strengthen  the  chalk  drawing  on  it,  and  he  now 
washes  the  ink  off  with  water.    Next  he  washes  it  with 


LITHOGRAPHY  281 

gum  arable  and  water  and  a  little  acid  mixed  with 
the  gum  arable,  and  the  tone  of  the  ink  comes  off  the 
undrawn-on  parts,  leaving  the  drawing.  Now  it  is 
ready  to  prove.  It  is  so  simple  to  prepare  a  plate 
that  artists  have  rarely  tried  it;  they  have  left  it 
to  professional  lithographers,  and  it  has  become 
their  property,  as  well  as  the  most  useful  and  the 
most  popular  form  of  engraving. 

The  printer  again  dampens  the  plate  and  then 
takes  his  large  roller  and  rolls  more  ink  on  to  the 
dampened  stone.  The  ink  is  adhering  only  on  the 
drawn-on  parts.  The  rest  of  the  surface  is  perfectly 
clean.     The  damp,  undrawn  parts  refuse  the  ink. 

The  old  printers  made  another  mystery  about 
this  stage:  you  must  never  touch  the  plate  or 
scarcely  look  at  it.  In  the  old  works  on  lithography 
you  were  told  to  cover  your  face  with  a  mask  and 
not  breathe  on  it,  and  the  most  horrible  thing  was 
to  spit  or  sneeze  on  it.  Hullmandel  in  the  first 
English  treatise  on  the  subject  gives  these  warnings. 
But  some  of  us  have  found  that  it  is  a  good  thing  to 
look  at  the  drawing,  and  keep  looking  at  it  to  see  how 
it  is  getting  along,  and  even  get  some  finger  marks 
on  it,  which  add  tone  to  it,  or  if  not  wanted  can 
easily  be  taken  off. 

The  first  lithograph  was  made  on  a  copper-plate 
press.  That  is  why  I  am  using  it,  to  show  those  of 
you  who  have  copper-plate  presses  that  you  can 
print  lithographs  on  them. 

Senefelder  used  one  in  his  experiments  before 
he  designed  a  press;  and  so  I  want  to  see  if  it  will  not 
work  today  as  it  did  in  the  very  beginning;  the 
inked  plate  with  damp  paper  on  it  is  run  through 
exactly  as  an  etching.  Of  course,  I  cannot  be 
absolutely  sure  that  it  will  print,  because  the  most 


282  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

extraordinary  things  happen  or  do  not  happen 
whenever  you  attempt  to  make  them  happen  in 
lithography.  I  want  to  try  Senefelder's  first  method; 
many  artists  today  use  copper-plate  presses  to  prove 
the  plates  which  they  have  made. 

Here  is  the  print — it  has  printed.  It  has  not 
enough  ink  on  it,  yet  the  lines  are  all  there,  only  they 
are  not  inked  enough.  But  that  shows  how  long 
it  takes  to  print  a  drawing  after  it  is  made.  Again 
the  printer  dampens  the  plate,  rolls  more  ink  on  it, 
and  more  ink  sticks  to  the  lines;  he  lays  another 
sheet  of  paper  on  the  plate,  pulls  down  the  tympan, 
and  runs  it  through  the  press;  the  proof  is  stronger; 
it  is  right.  He  now  washes  the  plate  with  acid  to 
prevent  its  absorbing  more  ink,  and  he  can  make 
any  number  of  prints. 

Later  Senefelder  invented  the  lithograph  press, 
which  in  a  way  is  very  much  better.  In  the  copper- 
plate press  the  pressure  was  obtained  by  rolling 
the  flat  plate  between  the  two  cylinders  when  the 
prints  came  off. 

The  lithograph  press  is  made  entirely  differently, 
because  the  lithographers  found  very  soon  that 
nothing  like  so  much  pressure  was  needed,  and  they 
also  discovered  it  was  very  much  easier  to  scrape  the 
ink  off  the  plate  by  passing,  as  the  printer  will  in  a 
moment,  the  plate  or  stone  placed  on  this  bed  under 
this  heavy  yoke.  The  bed  is  lifted  up,  and  here  in 
the  middle  is  a  bar  which  carries  a  scraper  at  the 
bottom.  There  is  no  necessity  for  the  heavy  pres- 
sure of  the  copper-plate  press.  The  zinc  is  now 
inked  again,  paper  laid  on  it,  and  as  it  passes  under 
this  heavy  yoke  the  ink  is  scraped  off  on  the  paper. 
It  does  not  require  that  enormous  pressure  which 
was  given  to  it  by  the  copper-plate  press.     You  see 


'  -^'-■^^^^^'-^^^^illlMf^rilivTrY^-' 


THE  BEGGARSTAFF  BROTHERS :  IRVING  AS  BECKET.    POSTER. 
LITHOGRAPH 


l¥it  msm.'^s, 


CITY#OFI 

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R.  A.  BELL:     SCHOOL    POSTER. 
LITHOGRAPH 


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TH.  STEINLEN:   POSTER.       LITHOGRAPH 


PAGE  272      JOSEPH  PENNELL  AT  WORK  ON  A  LITHOGRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  287 

how  he  lays  the  inked  sheet  of  zinc  on  the  bed  of 
the  press,  puts  the  paper  on  it,  pulls  down  the 
handle,  and  then  the  bed,  as  you  see,  rises  up 
against  the  scraper,  and  then  he  runs  the  whole  bed 
under  the  yoke,  and  the  ink  is  scraped  off  by  the 
scraper  as  the  plate  passes  beneath  it. 

Here  is  the  proof,  and  you  see  how  much  richer 
it  has  become.  Compare  it  with  the  first  proof.  It 
is  only  that  more  ink  adheres  to  the  drawing 
as  more  ink  is  rolled  on.  And  if  the  printer  went  on 
inking  it  for  any  length  of  time  without  washing  it 
with  acid — instead  of  acting  as  an  etching  does,  and 
getting  weaker,  a  lithograph  acts  in  exactly  the 
other  way;  it  gets  stronger  and  stronger — finally 
it  would  become  black  all  over,  but  even  then  it  could 
be  washed  out  with  acid.  The  printing  lines  get 
black  because  the  greasy  ink  sticks  to  them. 

Now,  in  order  to  stop  that  he  washes  the  plate 
with  a  mixture  of  chrome  acid  and  gum  arable,  and 
that  prevents  the  ink  from  accumulating  on  the 
drawing;  it  prevents  the  lines  which  were  drawn 
from  absorbing  more  ink.  The  lithographic  printers 
call  this  etching.  It  is  in  no  sense  etching  into 
relief  or  etching  hollows  in  the  plate  at  all.  It  is  only 
stopping  the  plate  from  absorbing  more  ink. 

Now  he  inks  it  again,  after  having  dampened  it, 
rolls  more  ink  on,  and  this  is  the  whole  secret  of 
lithography;  this  is  the  way  in  which  the  simplest 
lithograph  is  made.  And  as  you  see,  there  are 
no  secrets  about  it,  though  there  is  as  Whistler  said, 
"the  secret  in  doing  it,"  and  I  can  tell  you  that  if 
any  of  you  came  up  and  tried  to  ink  that  plate,  tried 
to  ink  it  as  he  is  doing  with  apparently  no  trouble 
at  all,  and  then  pull  it,  you  would  make  about  as 
bad  a  mess  of  it  as  could  be  made;   it  is  not  half  as 


288  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

easy  as  it  looks.  The  printer  does  not  even  have 
to  take  the  plate  off  the  press — he  inks  it  on  the 
bed.  There  is  another  proof,  just  the  same  as  the 
other,  and  it  would  go  on  printing  now  that  he  has 
washed  it  with  acid,  and  give  a  large  number  of 
proofs  without  getting  stronger.  I  do  not  know 
how  many.  That  depends  on  the  design  on  the 
plate.  I  imagine  this  would  print  some  thousands. 
But  that  is  not  usually  done,  at  any  rate  on  a  hand 
press,  but  by  steam — and  from  transfers,  which  I 
will  explain. 

But  the  way  in  which  most  artists  work  today, 
and  the  way  in  which  it  is  necessary  to  work  if  you 
are  going  to  work  out  of  doors,  is  to  draw  on  paper. 
All  you  do  is  to  make  the  drawing  on  a  sheet  of  rather 
thin  paper,  any  sort  that  you  like — this  one  is  on 
tracing  paper — the  only  absolute  necessity  is  you 
must  use  lithographic  chalk.  This  method  was  the 
earliest  of  Senefelder's  discoveries,  yet  the  method 
was  abandoned  for  many  years.  The  reason  why 
lithography  has  been  revived  is  because  artists  have 
learned  that  they  can  make  their  drawings  on  any 
sort  of  paper  they  like,  provided  it  is  reasonably  thin 
and  has  not  too  much  size  in  it.  The  next  thing  to 
do  after  you  have  made  your  drawing  on  the  paper 
is  to  dampen  it  on  the  back;  some  printers  use  hot, 
some  cold  water,  some  add  turpentine  or  acid  to  it, 
as  he  is  doing  now,  and  wash  the  stone  or  plate, 
then  pass  it  through  the  press,  and  a  very  extraor- 
dinary thing  will  happen,  or  should  happen — some- 
times it  doesn't  happen.  That  is,  as  the  drawing  is 
passed  through  the  press,  the  grease  which  is  in  this 
chalk  with  which  the  drawing  is  made,  comes  out 
of  the  drawing  on  the  paper  and  adheres  to  the  zinc 
plate,  while   the  carbon  or  lead,  or  whatever   the 


LITHOGRAPHY  289 

black  material  is,  stays  on  the  paper.  The  black 
is  added  to  the  grease  only  that  the  artist  may  see 
the  drawing.  And  if  the  experiment  comes  off 
successfully  you  will  see  the  most  curious  thing  of 
all — not  reproduced,  but  multiplied  art;  that  is, 
you  have  your  drawing  and  a  print  of  it  at  the  same 
time.  Sometimes  you  lose  both,  and  I  do  not  know 
what  will  happen  now. 

The  artistic  development  of  lithography  among 
artists  comes  from  this  method,  which  has  been 
revived  only  within  the  last  few  years,  the  method 
of  drawing  on  paper,  and  having  your  drawings  put 
down  on  metal  plates  or  stone.  It  makes  no 
difference  which  you  use.  The  only  reason  that 
zinc  or  aluminium  is  used  is  because  it  is  much  more 
portable.  You  see  this  stone  on  which  the  zinc  is 
backed.  It  is  placed  here  to  raise  the  surface  of 
the  plate  up  to  the  proper  height  in  order  that  the 
scraper  may  act  on  the  face  of  it.  Senefelder  in 
the  Grammar  of  Lithography  refers  to  the  method  but 
does  not  describe  it.    I  am  showing  it  to  you. 

Stone  is  regarded  as  something  sacred  and  pre- 
cious and  holy  because  of  the  wonderful  natural 
grain  that  is  in  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  stone 
which  Senefelder  used,  and  which  is  used  today, 
the  best  of  which  comes  from  quarries  in  Bavaria, 
— Solenhoefen — is  perfectly  smooth  and  has  no 
grain  at  all.  The  grain  is  artificial,  and  is  put  on 
either  by  taking  very  fine  sand  which  is  sprinkled 
on  the  face  of  the  smooth  stone,  pouring  water  on  it, 
and  then  rubbing  another  small  piece  of  stone  in 
every  direction  over  it  until  the  rubbing  and  scratch- 
ing of  the  sand  between  the  two  stones  produces  a 
grain  on  the  stone  or  on  the  zinc  plate,  or  it  may 
be  done  in  other  ways.     There  are  great  roughened 


290  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

marbles  which  are  rolled  violently  around  over  it 
in  sand  until  the  grain  is  made,  or  it  is  done  by  a 
sand  blast.  The  reason  for  using  the  grain  is  that 
if  you  drew  on  a  perfectly  smooth  stone,  every  line, 
as  in  photo-engraving,  would  print  perfectly  black; 
you  would  have  no  way  of  making  greys.  If  you 
want  solid  blacks  only  in  the  design,  you  do  not 
use  any  grain  on  the  stone.  These  drawings  may 
be  made  with  pen  or  chalk.  But  if  you  have  a 
drawing  with  tones — greys — in  it,  in  order  to  keep 
them  and  break  up  the  solid  blacks,  there  must  be 
a  grain  on  the  stone;  or  else  they  will  all  print  solid 
black.  So  much  for  that.  There  is,  however,  in  the 
artificial  grain  on  the  stone  a  certain  quality,  and 
that  quality  is  to  certain  artists  very  pleasing  indeed, 
but  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  art  of  lithography 
at  all,  though  some  people  say  it  gives  the  litho- 
graphic quality.  But  it  is  not  an  artistic  quality. 
Many  people  prefer  it;  on  the  other  hand,  many 
artists  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  stone; 
they  hate  it.  The  Solenhoefen  stone  is  best  because 
it  has  a  uniform  surface  and  absorbs  water  and 
grease  perfectly. 

If  you  are  doing  a  drawing  in  a  lithograph  shop 
it  is  infinitely  better  to  use  the  stone,  because  you 
are  sure  that  the  drawing  will  print.  But  when 
you  make  a  drawing  on  paper  and  transfer  it,  as  the 
printer  is  going  to  do,  to  the  stone,  you  are  not 
absolutely  sure  what  you  are  going  to  get.  The 
result  is  in  many  ways  uncertain. 

Of  course  in  working  seriously  one  should  have 
all  these  things  ready,  but  the  great,  eminent,  and 
very  generous  artists  sent  in  their  valuable  contri- 
butions only  about  ten  minutes  ago,  and  it  requires 
some  little  time  to  get  them  ready.     There  is  no 


LITHOGRAPHY  291 

great  secret  about  this.  All  the  printer  has  done 
is  to  wet  the  back  of  the  drawing  with  a  sponge  and 
water. 

He  is  going  to  transfer  two  drawings,  and  this 
ought  to  be  rather  interesting,  because  one  of  them 
is  done  on  a  thick  piece  of  paper  and  is  rather  elabo- 
rate in  tone — they  are  both  elaborate — and  the 
other  is  on  a  thinner  paper.  All  he  does  now  is  to 
lay  them  face  downward  on  the  stone.  He  must 
be  very  careful  about  keeping  all  these  plates  and 
stones  damp,  because  otherwise,  if  the  plate  is  allowed 
to  dry  and  the  ink  is  rolled  on  it,  when  the  drawing 
is  put  down  on  it  the  grease  is  very  liable  to  spread 
and  smear  the  drawing. 

He  is  dampening  the  face  of  the  zinc,  that  only 
the  drawn-on  parts  may  take  the  ink.  Lithography, 
though  so  simple,  is  only  beginning  to  be  understood, 
because  for  the  fifty  or  sixty  years  in  which  it  was 
used  only  for  commercial  work,  scarcely  any  experi- 
ments were  made.  It  is  only  within  the  last  few 
years  that  artists  have  been  trying  experiments, 
and  it  is  only  within  the  last  few  years  that  we 
have  learned  how  many  ways  there  are  of  making 
drawings. 

All  the  drawings  I  have  here  this  afternoon  are 
drawn  with  chalk.  But  drawings  may  be  made 
with  a  pen  on  paper  and  transferred,  as  these  now 
will  be.  They  can  be  made  with  a  brush.  They 
can  be  made  with  wash,  though  that  is  rather  unre- 
liable to  transfer  to  stone,  and  it  is  better  to  make 
wash  drawings  on  stone,  zinc,  or  aluminium. 

He  is  now  putting  pressure  on  the  press,  and  he 
runs  the  drawing  through  it.  I  simply  wanted  to 
see,  by  raising  the  edge  of  the  paper,  whether  the 
drawing  had  come  off  of  the  paper  and  adhered  to 


292  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

the  stone,  as  it  should.  It  sometimes  takes  several 
runs  of  the  press  before  the  grease  will  come  out. 
The  only  danger  in  doing  so  is  that  the  drawings 
stick  to  the  zinc  plates,  and  then  I  can  tell  you 
you  have  a  very  lively  time  to  get  that  piece  of  paper 
off.  The  professional  printer  does  not  work  in  this 
way.  He  runs  the  paper  repeatedly  through  the 
press,  wetting  it  each  time  till  the  paper  becomes 
pulp  and  is  washed  off,  and  the  drawing  adheres  to 
the  stone. 

You  see  now  I  lift  them  off  the  press  and  there 
are  the  drawings,  and  very  elaborate  ones  they  are, 
and  nothing  apparently  has  happened  to  them. 
But  I  can  see  up  here  that  the  grease,  or  a  certain 
amount  of  it,  has  been  extracted  from  them.  There 
are  the  drawings,  apparently  uninjured — in  fact 
they  are  not  injured  at  all.  You  could  run  these 
drawings  through  again,  put  them  through  the 
press  again  and  more  grease  would  come  off,  because 
there  is  still  enough  in  them  to  transfer  to  the  stone. 

Putting  them  down  in  this  way  is  what  is  called 
transferring.  This  also  was  supposed  to  be  wrapped 
in  mystery,  but  you  have  seen  how  the  work  is  done. 
But  there  is  almost  nothing  to  be  seen  on  the  stone. 

In  order  to  make  these  drawings  print  he  will 
wash  the  drawing  on  the  plate  with  an  inky  rag. 
There  is  hardly  anything,  that  you  can  see.  I  can 
see  the  ghost  of  the  design  of  both  of  them.  He 
now  washes  them  with  gum  arable  and  water  in  a 
way  to  protect  them.  And  we  are  doing  just  as  we 
did  last  week  in  etching;  I  mean  that  we  are  doing 
things  in  five  minutes  that  we  ought  to  take  at 
least  five  hours  to  do.  And  sometimes  these  affairs 
become  rather  refractory  and  do  not  act  the  way 
they  ought  to  under  such  treatment. 


LITHOGRAPHY  293 

But  as  he  washes  them  with  a  rag  which  is  dipped 
in  ink,  the  drawings  are  absorbing  ink  and  coming 
up.  That  is  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  things. 
The  zinc  did  absorb  the  grease  which  was  in  that 
drawing,  and  the  drawing  will  come  up  on  the 
plate,  as  you  will  see  in  a  minute  by  rubbing  more 
greasy  ink  on  it.  Every  bit  of  the  grease  on  the 
zinc  will  print. 

One  of  the  things  which  Senefelder  said  was  that 
lithography  will  be  an  excellent  way  for  writing 
secret  documents,  because  you  can  write  them  in 
invisible  greasy  ink,  and  when  the  documents  are 
received  they  can  be  rubbed  up  in  the  way  he  has 
rubbed  those  designs  up  now,  and  the  person  who 
receives  the  documents  can  read  what  has  been 
written  in  invisible  ink.  And  such  letters  in  litho- 
graphic ink  could  be  written  over  or  under  an 
ordinary  letter,  transferred  as  he  transferred  these 
designs,  and  rubbed  up  as  he  rubs  them  up,  and  the 
whole  would  be  legible.  This  drawing  is  coming 
out  perfectly  now.  It  is  the  attraction  of  grease 
for  grease,  and  the  repulsion  of  water  by  grease. 

The  drawing  is  all  there  but  faint,  and  the  other 
one  I  expect  will  come  up.  If  they  had  behaved 
rightly,  which  they  did  not,  enough  grease  would 
have  come  off  to  show  the  design  on  the  zinc.  But 
it  can  be  coaxed  up  in  the  way  in  which  he  is  doing 
it  now. 

I  believe  the  draughtsman  was  trying  to  get 
the  better  of  me  by  using  Conte  or  some  other 
crayon;  as  a  matter  of  fact  he  did  not  get  the  better 
of  me,  but  he  got  the  better  of  the  zinc,  for  nothing 
will  act  on  the  plate  but  lithographic  chalk.  It  is 
not  the  fault  of  lithography,  it  is  the  fault  of  the 
person  who  made  the  drawing,  I  am  positive  about 


294  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

that.  And  that  is  the  way  the  Hthographer  always 
talks.  He  always  blames  the  artist.  You  will 
find,  when  the  school  starts,  that  you  will  get  all 
the  blame.  It  is  never  the  fault  of  the  lithographer. 
But  I  do  think  there  is  something  wrong  with  the 
chalk  which  has  been  used  in  this  drawing.  You 
can  see  that  one  drawing  has  come  out,  as  he  rubbed 
it  up.  The  other  one  probably  would  come,  but 
it  would  come  very  slowly  indeed.  And  we  have 
not  time  to  humor  and  coax  it.  So  we  will  try 
others. 

These  drawings,  after  they  have  been  trans- 
ferred and  rubbed  up  in  this  way,  ought  to  be 
allowed  to  dry,  because  at  this  time  the  surface  of 
the  zinc  is  very  sensitive,  and  you  can  very  easily, 
when  putting  the  ink  on,  either  smear  the  drawing 
all  up  and  get  it  perfectly  black,  or  rub  it  all  off  and 
destroy  the  design.  But  the  zinc  and  stone  are 
of  a  very  forgiving  nature  as  well  as  very  absorbent, 
otherwise  they  might  object  and  give  up  entirely.. 
But  they  do  act  in  an  extraordinarily  sensitive 
fashion,  as  you  will  see. 

It  proves,  as  I  said  a  moment  ago,  the  advantage 
of  drawing  on  stone  or  on  zinc,  because  then  every- 
thing you  draw  prints  as  you  drew  it,  the  only  change 
being  that  the  drawing  is  reversed,  as  all  engravings 
are  reversed. 

These  others,  although  you  have  not  seen  them 
yet — have  come  perfectly;  none  of  the  black  coloring 
matter  has  been  taken  out  of  the  designs  at  all. 
Yet  equally  black  designs  are  on  the  zinc  plate — 
and  now  they  have  printed  perfectly  and  here 
beside  them  are  the  originals. 

There  is  no  end,  however,  to  the  means  or  the 
methods    of    making    lithographs.     Those    colored 


GEORGE  W.  EGGERS :    DRAWING  AND  LITHOGRAPH  PRINT  FROM  IT 


HANS  UNGER:   HEAD.      LITHOGRAPH 


/ 


ALLEN    PHILBRICK :     DRAWING    ON    PAPER  AND    PRINT  FROM  IT 
TRANSFERRED   TO    STONE   AND    PRINTED    AT   THESE    LECTURES 


AUBREY  BEARDSLEY:  POSTER.      LITHO- 
GRAPH 


LITHOGRAPHY  299 

posters  that  you  have  seen,  the  war  posters  that  were 
issued  for  Liberty  Loans,  were  nearly  every  one 
of  them — I  think  all  of  them — done  in  lithography, 
but  they  were  nearly  all  of  them  done  by  men  and 
women  who  did  not  know  anything  about  lithog- 
raphy. And  the  drawings  were  mostly  made  not 
in  lithographic  chalk,  but  as  water  colors  or  oil 
paintings,  and  when  they  had  been  so  made,  the 
originals  had  to  be  photographed  on  to  sheets  of 
zinc  or  stone  or  redrawn  on  the  zinc  or  stone  by  a 
trained  craftsman  in  lithography,  whereas  if  they 
had  been  made  in  black  and  white  just  as  the 
Japanese  wood  cutters  made  their  drawings,  just 
as  the  students  have  made  these  drawings,  they 
could  then  have  been  transferred  just  as  these  can 
be,  to  the  stone  or  metal  plates,  and  printed.  About 
five  of  the  five  hundred  artists  who  made  war 
posters  understood  lithography,  and  the  other  four 
hundred  and  ninety-five  did  not.  The  conse- 
quence was  that  the  four  hundred  and  ninety-five 
posters  had  to  be  redrawn,  and  this  not  only  delayed 
the  United  States  Liberty  Loans,  but  it  cost  the 
United  States  government  an  enormous  sum  of 
money  for  unnecessary  time  and  labor.  And 
every  artist  whose  work  was  copied  and  redrawn 
also  was  disappointed.  He  knew  nothing  about  the 
art,  and  most  of  the  so-called  lithographic  artists 
knew  nothing  about  design,  and  the  result  was  that 
in  every  case  the  drawings  were  changed  and  lost  in 
character,  excepting  those  of  the  half  a  dozen  men 
who  did  know.  There  was  the  usual  row  between 
the  artists  and  the  lithographers,  and  in  this  case 
the  lithographers  were  right.  Artists  made  draw- 
ings for  those  Liberty  Loan  posters  in  colors  which 
would  not  reproduce,  and  they  made  them  in  such 


300  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

a  fashion  that  they  had  to  be  redrawn.  And  it 
was  all  the  fault  of  the  artists  who  had  not  been 
trained  technically — and  many  of  them  were  too 
lazy  or  too  stupid  to  learn  or  even  care. 

Now  what  you  are  going  to  learn  in  this  school 
is  how  to  work,  because  lithography  is  a  craft,  and 
you  have  got  to  learn  that  craft,  and  unless  you 
have  mastered  it — and  there  are  many  things  which 
are  difficult  and  many  which  are  easy — you  are  not 
fit  really,  and  you  will  never  have  the  chance  of 
being  allowed  to  work  for  a  lithographer;  because 
even  a  lithographer  is  not  a  benevolent  institution, 
though  a  good  many  people  seem  to  think  that  art 
is  a  benevolent  institution  in  which  artists  who  have 
not  learned  their  trade  can  play  tricks  upon  less 
intelligent  manufacturers,  but  even  they  know 
enough  not  to  allow  it  to  be  done,  at  any  rate, 
after  one  encounter  with  an  ignorant  artist. 

If  you  are  trying  to  make  a  design  in  color  it 
should  be  made  in  black  and  white,  treated  exactly 
as  a  Japanese  wood  block  is,  as  I  have  treated  these 
plates.  When  the  black  and  white  drawing  has 
been  put  on  the  stone  or  the  zinc  plate,  as  many 
transfers  of  it  in  greasy  ink  should  then  be  taken  as 
colors  are  wanted,  one  color  for  each  stone  or  plate, 
and  those  colors  should  be  applied  exactly  as  the 
Japanese  do  one  after  the  other,  not  one  on  top  of 
the  other,  as  the  lithographers  do,  but  side  by  side 
as  a  mosaic. 

If  you  remember  the  two  posters  that  I  showed 
you  by  Beardsley  and  by  Falls,  they  were  done  in 
this  way,  and  they  came  out  so  wonderfully  because 
those  artists  knew  how  to  draw,  and  draw  for  the 
lithographer.  And  you  must  know  how  to  draw — 
you  must  know  how   to  make  lithographs   before 


LITHOGRAPHY  301 

you  can  make  them.  You  have  to  have  this  tech- 
nical knowledge,  and  if  you  have  not  that  knowledge, 
you  cannot  do  good  work.  And  that  is  the  great 
good  news  that  Mr.  Eggers  brought  to  you  this 
afternoon,  that  you  are  going  to  have  a  lithographic 
school  started  here  in  which  you  can  practice,  and 
if  you  can  do  good  work  you  can  become  good 
lithographers,  and  then,  having  studied  art,  studied 
drawing  and  painting,  you  have  a  chance  to  work 
in  a  practical  way,  a  chance  of  making  a  decent 
living.  And  if  the  Lord  Almighty  has  made  you  an 
artist,  you  have  something  to  fall  back  on  and 
depend  upon  if  the  public  has  not  the  brains  to 
appreciate  your  painting.  Meanwhile  let  us  try 
to  print  some  more  drawings.  The  drawings  must 
be  perfectly  dampened.  Again  one  is  on  thin  and 
one  on  thick  paper.  Now  when  the  printer  runs 
them  through  the  press  we  shall  see  what  will 
happen. 

These  are  good;  you  see  the  grease  has  come 
out  and  adhered  to  the  stone.  There  is  the  original 
unchanged. 

That  is  one  of  the  few  things  which  have  been 
discovered  in  lithography,  as  we  thought,  until 
finally,  on  reading  Senefelder's  book  The  Grammar 
of  Lithography y  of  which  I  showed  you  the  title-page 
on  a  slide  the  other  day,  we  found  that  he  knew 
it,  because  he  said,  "There  is  still  another  way  of 
transferring  by  which  the  drawing  can  be  saved," 
but  then  he  did  not  tell  us  the  way  in  which  it  could 
be  done.  But  I  have  shown  you  the  way  in  which 
it  is  done.  And  this  art  of  extracting  the  grease 
from  the  drawing  and  keeping  the  drawing  is  almost 
the  only  thing  the  modern  artists  have  discovered — 
and  yet  all  the  while  Senefelder  knew  it. 


302  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

The  printer  is  rubbing  the  zinc  with  gum  and 
water  to  protect  them;  now  he  washes  the  gum  off, 
and  rubs  them  with  ink  to  get  on  faster,  but  it  is 
not  the  best  or  the  safest  way;  he  should  roll  them 
up  with  his  roller,  but  in  this  land  of  hustle,  we 
do  things  in  a  hurry  and  repent  at  leisure. 

There  are  an  infinite  number  of  other  ways  in 
which  lithographs  can  be  made.  For  example,  as 
you  may  remember,  I  showed  you  one  the  other 
day  in  which  the  whole  surface  of  the  stone  was 
blackened  with  a  tone  of  ink  and  then  the  design 
scratched  out  with  a  scraper  or  with  a  point 
just  as  mezzotints  are  made.  Aquatint  grounds 
can  be  put  on  the  surface.  The  stone  may  be  etched 
into  relief,  or  it  may  be  engraved,  or  the  drawing 
may  be  etched  into  it. 

There  is  no  way  at  all  by  which  a  lithograph 
cannot  be  made,  or  a  beautiful  result  be  obtained, 
by  a  trained  artist.  Just  as  in  all  the  other  graphic 
arts,  there  is  that  one  little  necessity — the  artist 
must  know  how  to  draw  before  he  can  make  a 
lithograph,  or  a  work  of  art  of  any  sort.  And 
besides  he  must  be  trained  in  the  craft. 

Those  drawings  are  coming  up  perfectly  now. 
They  will  at  first  be  somewhat  weak,  as  the  others 
were,  but  they  are  all  right.  I  do  not  know  what 
was  the  matter  with  the  first  one,  but  I  think  it  was 
the  crayon  the  artist  used  instead  of  lithographic 
chalk.  The  printer  says  it  was,  so  that  is  the  end 
of  it. 

In  making  wash  drawings  it  is  better  to  work 
directly  on  stone,  because  the  transferring  of  wash  is 
very  difficult,  though  it  is  being  done  now.  And 
those  wash  drawings  that  I  showed  you  by  Whistler 
and  other  artists  were  done  on  stone,  because,  as 


LITHOGRAPHY  303 

I  say,  the  use  of  wash  on  paper  is  very  uncertain, 
and  very  unreliable.  But  few  artists  today  are 
using  the  stone,  preferring  paper,  at  any  rate  to 
commence  their  work  on.  But  after  you  have  got 
the  drawing  on  the  grained  stone  or  zinc  you  can 
work  to  any  extent  on  it  with  chalk  or  with  ink 
or  with  wash.  Before  it  has  been  etched,  when  it 
is  in  the  state  that  this  is  now,  before  it  is  washed 
with  gum  and  water,  you  can  draw  on  it  or  take 
anything  from  it.  After  it  has  been  gummed  up 
and  etched,  it  is  rather  difficult  to  make  changes, 
though  you  can  remove  the  etched  surface  and  the 
gum  and  water  by  using  other  acid  on  it,  counter- 
etching,  as  the  lithographer  calls  it,  and  then  you 
can  make  any  changes  you  want  to.  You  are  not 
prevented  from  making  changes  because  you  have 
drawn  on  paper  and  then  transferred  the  design 
to  stone.  In  fact,  the  only  real  difficulty  about 
making  lithographs  upon  paper  is  that,  unless  you 
have  some  specially  prepared  paper  with  a  surface 
through  which  you  can  scratch,  you  cannot  make 
any  changes  at  all  on  the  paper,  and  you  must  wait 
until  you  get  your  drawing  on  the  stone  before  you 
do  so. 

There,  he  has  taken  the  turpentine  and  washed 
the  drawing  all  out.  It  is  apparently  gone.  That 
is  one  of  the  most  curious  things  about  lithography. 
But  the  grease  is  there  in  the  plate.  And  now  he 
inks  it  with  the  inky  roller,  and  now  in  a  moment  he 
washes  it  out;  it  has  disappeared;  and  now  he  rolls 
it  up,  and  the  drawing  has  come  back  again.  The 
first  time  you  make  a  lithograph  and  see  that  done 
to  your  drawing  you  will  have  rather  a  fright.  You 
will  think  it  is  done  for.  But  it  is  not.  The  grease 
is  in  the  stone  or^plate,  and  it  will  come  back.     It  is 


304  THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

only  the  ink  on  the  surface  which  the  printer  has 
washed  off. 

The  whole  surface  is  now  coated  with  ink  in 
order  to  get  it  to  adhere  to  the  drawing.  One  wishes 
all  the  time  that  one  could  make  use  of  that  beautiful 
tone  which  is  now  on  the  surface  of  the  plate,  but 
there  is  no  way  that  has  been  discovered  yet  of 
really  fixing  it  and  getting  tone,  unless  you  draw  a 
tone  on  it  with  stumps  or  rags  covered  with  powdered 
or  soft  chalk — touche,  the  printers  call  it. 

There  are  other  ways,  and  I  wish  I  had  time,  but 
it  would  take  a  week  to  show  you  half  the  ways  in 
which  lithographs  are  made.  They  will  be  taught. 
They  are  what  you  are  going  to  learn  in  this  school 
that  is  to  be  started  at  once.  You  will  learn  that 
there  are  endless  methods,  and  if  you  care  for  lithog- 
raphy you  will  find  them  fascinating. 

Now  the  ink  is  washed  off,  owing  to  the  plate 
having  been  dampened,  only  remaining  on  the  lines, 
and  those  two  designs  are  coming  up  wonderfully, 
perfectly,  as  well  as  they  could  be  made  to,  right 
away.  You  see  how  long  it  takes.  There  is  no 
intermediary,  no  one  who  copies  your  work,  no  pho- 
tography, no  engraving  or  etching.  These  are  the 
drawings  that  the  artists  made,  multiplied;  not 
reproduced,  but  multiplied.  They  have  printed 
perfectly.  There  is  nothing  so  extraordinary  in  the 
graphic  arts  as  the  sensitive  way  in  which  these 
drawings  disappear,  and  then  reappear  by  having 
a  little  ink  put  on  them.  It  is  nothing  more  than 
the  fact  that  the  grease  attracts  grease  and  repels 
water.  It  is  magic,  yet  it  is  so  simple,  that  artists 
never  even  tried  it  for  fifty  years — so  simple  it  fell 
into  the  hands  of  the  "manufacturer,"  as  the  lithog- 
rapher calls  himself. 


LITHOGRAPHY  305 

This  first  print  will  probably  be  rather  grey. 
It  is  printed  stunningly,  the  first  time.  That  was 
very  well  done  indeed.  In  places  it  is  too  black. 
We  have  too  much  ink  on  the  plate,  but  that  can 
be  washed  with  more  of  the  acid,  which  will  reduce 
that  strong  patch  in  the  hair.  It  is  perfectly  easy 
to  get  the  grey  back;  it  is  perfectly  easy  to  do  any- 
thing except  the  drawing.  The  other  parts  of  it 
are  right  because  the  artist  has  learned  to  draw. 

I  could  tell  you  any  number  of  other  methods, 
but  I  think  the  time  is  up.  I  must  say  this,  that 
if  you  think  you  have  learned  anything  from  these 
lectures  which  you  have  listened  to  during  the 
last  three  weeks,  I  am  only  too  glad.  I  have  shown 
you  how  important  in  modern  life  the  graphic  arts 
are.  But  as  I  have  said,  it  is  not  by  honoring  me  in 
coming  here  to  listen  patiently  that  you  will  learn 
anything,  but  it  is  by  endless  work.  And  now,  in 
one  branch  of  the  graphic  arts,  lithography,  you  are 
going  to  have  a  chance  to  work  practically  as  you 
have  in  etching  in  this  school.  You  are  going  to 
have  an  opportunity  that  nobody  in  this  country 
ever  had  before,  and  you  ought  to  thank  the  Art 
Institute  for  giving  you  that  opportunity.  And  if  I 
have  had  any  part  in  helping  to  get  practical  art 
education  introduced  into  the  art  schools  of  the 
Art  Institute  of  Chicago,  I  am  only  too  happy,  and 
I  have  not  given  the  Scammon  Lectures  in  vain. 


LITHOGRAPH   PRESS 


INDEX 


INDEX 

Abbey,  E.  A.,  50,  86,  87,  88,  126 
Advertisements,  86,  no,  115,  116,  118, 
119 

Allingham,  William,  34 
Ally  Sloper's  Half-Holiday,  107 
Aluminium,  289,  291 
America,  92;   Secretary  of  Art  in,  267 
American:    Academy  in   Rome,    267, 
268;    art,  121;    caricature,  104,  107; 
design,     77,     78;      illustration,     130; 
illustrators,      262;       landscape,      71; 
posters,  266,  271 
Anquetin,  246 

Aquatint,    154,    155,    156,    182,    195, 
197-98,  243,  24s,  302 
Arabian  Nights,  44 
Architecture,  7,  80,  85,  86,  255 
Art,  American,  121;  commercial,  121; 
printing,  132 

Art  Institute  of  Chicago,  vii,  6,  275. 
305;  Buckingham  collection,  23;  Eng- 
lish collection,  9;  illustrations  in,  9, 
58,  61.  67,  68,  75,  90;  Ryerson  Library, 
3,  14,  66,  178 
Ayer,  Edward  E.,  collection 

Miniature  from  early  manuscript, 

26 

Ballantyne,  of  Vale  Press,  91 
Bauer,  Marius  A.  F.,  252 

The  Sphinx,  265 
Baumann,  Gustave,  71 

The  Landmark,  68 
Baxter,  W.  G.,  107 
Beardsley,  Aubrey,  99,  100,  126,  256, 
300 

Illustration  for  Morle  d' Arthur,  98 

Poster,  298 
Beggarstaflf  Brothers,  72.     See  James 
Pryde  and  William  Nicholson 

Irving  as  Becket,  283 
Bell,  R.  Anning.  103 

Jack  the  Giant-Killer,  102 

School  poster,  284 
Bellows,  George,  271,  276 

The  Murder  of  Edith  Cavell,  270 
Bentworth,  34 
Bewick,  Thomas,  30,  :ii,  123 

The  Woodcock,  28 

Blake,  William,  29,  2>i,  78,  79,  91,  154, 
157,  218,  221 

The  Morning  Stars  Sang  Together, 

27 


Block  books,  12 
Blocks,  color,  132 
Blum,  Robert,  85,  86 

Joe  Jefferson,  83 
Bone,  Muirhead,  185,  261 

Orvieto,  184 

The  Shipyard,  260 
Bonington,  Richard,  228.  231 

Rue  du  Gros-Horloge,  2  50 
Book  plates,  96 
Booth,  Franklin,  114,  116 

Pen  drawing  for  newspaper  adver- 
tisement, 118 
Bosse,  Abraham,  150 

Etchers  at  Work.  135,  151 

The  Printer  at  Work,  152 
Botticelli,  20,  52 
Bracquemond,  Felix,  59,  178 

Portrait  of,  by  Rajon,  214 
Brangwyn,  Frank,  185,  189,  261 

Etching,  184 

Porters,  259 
Brennan,  Alfred.  85 

Stairway,  Chantilly,  84 
Brown,  Madox,  49 
Buhot,  F.,  181 

Country  Neighbors,  180 
Bureau  of  Public  Information,   262. 
See  War  work. 
Burne- Jones,  49,  88 
Burr,  IS,  165,  192 
Busch,  William,  104 

Caldecott,  Randolph,  14,  44 

The  Mad  Dog,  46 
Callot,  149 
Calvert,  Edward,  33 

The  Plowman,  28 
Caricaturists,  238.     See  Comic  artists 
Carriere,  246 

Carrington,  Frederick,  2;  Etching  and 
Engraving,  136 
Cassatt,  Mary,  178,  182 

Mother  and  Child,  179 
Cattermole,  238 
Caxton  Club,  Chicago,  21 
Century  Magazine,  The,  50,  85 
Charivari,  231 
Charlet,  T.,  227-28 

Tireurs  de  la  Compagnie  Infernale, 

229 


310 

Chaucer,     The    KelmscoU,    88.     See 
W.  Morris 
Chefdeville,  7g 

Chicago,  city -planning,  72.     See  Art 
Institute  of  Chicago 
Chinese,  3 
Chodowiecki,  154 

Cincinnati  Museum,  School  of  Lithog- 
raphy, 273 
Cole,  Timothy,  50,  79 

Head    of    Flora,    from    Botticelli's 

"Spring,"  52 
Color  printing,  66,  72,  132,  208 
Color  prints,  57,  59,  60,  64,  67,  68; 
Japanese,  56,  61,  253 
Comic  artists,  104,  107 
Conte,  293 
Copper,  192,  218 
Cornhill,  The,  38 
Corot,  24 
Cotman,  157 
Crane,  Walter,  11,  65 

Color    Print    for    Beauty    and    the 

Beast,  64 
Cruikshank,  162 
Curmer,  33 

Dalziel,  34 

Dalziel  Brothers,  34,  35,  39,  40,  42, 

44.  47,  48 

Dalziel's  Bible  Gallery,  48,  49 

Daumier,  H.,  231 

Rue  du  Transnonain,  233 
Defoe,  44 

DeGoncourts,  178,  232 
De  Groux,  Henri,  245 
DeHooge,  108 
Delacroix,  E.,  237 

The  Lion  of  the  Atlas,  235 
Design,  decorative  and  realistic,  11 
DeVinne,  50 
Dial,  The,  91 
Drake,  50 

Drawing,  8;  chalk,  92,  94,  231;  char- 
coal, 109,  no,  III,  251;  English  and 
French,  238,  267;  for  etching,  199; 
line,  12s;  original,  212;  pen,  see  Pen 
drawing;  to  reproduce,  80,  103,  126; 
Spanish  method,  85;  on  stone  or 
zinc,  294;  wash,  103,  231,  246,  251, 
255-302 


THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Dry  point,  15,  160,  165,  169,  170-71, 
172,  178,  179,  189,  191,  211,  215 
Diirer,  Albrecht,  18,  23,  79,  95,  114, 
123,  124,  136,  137,  138,  153.  162,  178, 
188,  219,  220 

An  Angel  Appearing  to  Joachim,  18 

Great  Cannon,  137,  138,  139 
Du  Maurier,  George,  38 

Illustration  from  Punch,  39 
Duveneck,  F.,  154,  167,  170 

The  Rialto,  164 

Ecole  des  Beaux  Arts,  268 

Eggers,  George  W.,  275-76,  278,  301 

Drawing     and    Lithograph     Print 

from  It,  29s 
Electroplating,  211 
England,  19,  65,91,  165,  221,  238,  251; 
lithography  in,  238;  metal  engraving, 
218;   wood  engraving,  zi 
Engraving,   8;    black-line,   123;    and 
etching,  137;   line,  129;  on  metal,  12, 
138;  process,  80,  124;  reproduced,  24; 
tools,  13;  white-line,  123;  on  wood,  30 
Escorial  Library,  20 
Etcher,  The,  186,  199 

Etching,  15,  131,  135,  137.  138,  146, 
160,  163,  164,  174,  177,  180,  183,  184, 
194,  204,  215;  color,  208;  The 
Etchers,  135-86;  ground,  190; 
methods,  187-216;  mezzotint,  159; 
monotype,  206;  needle,  15;  press, 
205.213;  smoking,  191;  soft  ground, 
157,  182,  192,  193;  technique,  210; 
on  zinc  or  copper,  188 
Evans,  Edmund,  44,  46,  64,  65 

Falls,  C.  B.,  114,  117,  271,  300 

Eagle,  The,  117 

Poster,  266 
Fantin-Latour,  244,  252 

Roses,  236 

Symphony.  235 
Favre,  A.,  251 

On  les  aura!  248 
Figaro,  104,  251 
Fildes,  Luke,  43 
Fischer,  Otto,  244 
Fletcher,  F.  Morley,  65,  66,  71 

Meadow   Sweet.     Key   block    and 

print,  64 
Fliegende  Blatter,  104 
Forain,  J.  L.,  104,  125,  251 

The  Letter,  250 


22o; 

222, 


INDEX 

Fortuny,  Mariano,  7g,  80,  85 

Study     from     Dariller's     Life     oj 
Forluny,  76 

France:  lithography  in,  237,  238,  251; 
seaports  of,    231;     wood    engraving, 
33.  80 
Frost,  Arthur  B.,  104 

Our  Cat  Eats  Rat  Poison,  105 


Gavarni,  A.,  232 

Pere  Vireloque,  234 
Gericault,  222,  227 
German:  artists,  220;    galleries, 
method,  g6 

Germany,  10,  19,  66,  104,  221, 
243,  251 

Gibson,  Charles  Dana,  107 
Gil  Bias  [lustre',  251 
Gillot,  79 

Good  Words,  38,  85 
Gouache,  131 
Goulding,  Charles,  272 
Goya  y  Lucientes,  Francisco,  154 

The  Bull  Fight,  226 

The  Witches,  156 
Graphic  Arts,  The,  i,  50,  53,  133, 
220,  222,  231,  278,  279,  302,  304, 
books  on,  2,  6;  defined,  2,  7;  E; 
tians  practiced,  8;  iSSo-igoo, 
etching,  135,  187;  illustration, 
men  and  methods,  i 
Graphic,  The  London,  43,  45,  108 
Graver,  15,  29,  122,  123,  127,  135, 
150,  165 

Green,  Elizabeth  Shippen,  72 
Gregori^  43 
Greiner,  Otto,  96,  244 
Griggs,  F.  E.,  99 
Guerin,  Jules,  72 
Guthrie,  James  (Pear  Tree  Press), 


227 


217, 
30s; 

gyp- 
50; 
ss; 


137, 


Haden,  F.  Seymour,  t6s,  166,  167 

Hands  Etching,  10  ; 

Kilgaren  Castle,  ih^ 

Sunset  in  Ireland,  '60 
Half-tone,  126,  129,  130 
Hals,  Franz,  78 
Hamerton,  2,  162 

Hammersmith.  William  Morris'  Print- 
ing Shop  at.  93 
Hanf.^taen'-'l 

Portrait  of  Senef elder,  223 


311 

Harding,  George,  113 
Harper's  Magazine,  50,  85,  87 
Harper's  Weekly,  109 
Harvey,  William,  30 
Haydon,  Benjamin  Robert,  30 
Henschel,  Carl,  99 
Herkomer,  43 
Ilerrick's  Poems,  50 
Hervier,  232 
Hirosliigc,  56,  59,  174 

The  Falling  Rocket,  57 
Hobby  Horse,  The,  96 
Hogarth,  49,  150,  162 
Hokusai,  56,  59 
Holbein,  23 
Holland,  141 
Hollar,  99,  149 
Homer,  Winslow,  277 
Hooper,  W.  H.,  88 
Home,  Herbert,  96 
Houghton,  Arthur  Boyd,  43 

The  Tombs,  45 
Hullmandel,  281 
Hunt,  W.  Holman,  37,  238 

The  Lady  of  Shalott,  36 
Hyde,  Helen,  66 
Hypnerotomachia  (Poliphili),  17,  19 

Illumination,  20,  21 
Illuminators,  11 

Illustration,  5-53;  Diirer  began,  23; 
methods,  55-133;  modern  develop- 
ment of,  55,  78,  9S;  newspaper,  113; 
profession,  116;  reproducing,  6;  tech- 
nical imperfections,  8 
Isabey,  E..  231 

Return  to  Port,  233 
Italian,  99;   engravers,  154 

Jacque,  Charles,  ^$ 
Japanese:  art,  43;    artists,  60;    color 
prints,  56  61,  253;  illustration,  56,  77; 
improvements  by,  59;    methods,  59, 
60,  72,  99,  123,  124,  174;   printer,  58; 
prints.  142;  woodcutting,  3,  12,  136 
Jungling,  50 
Jugend,  115 

Advertisement,  119 

Keats,  100 

Keene,  Charles.  49,  107,  126 
The  Unrecognized  Visitor,  51 


312 

Keat,  Rockwell,  78 

Cain,  75 
Khayyam,  Omar,  109.     See  Elihu 
Vedder 

Ladies'  Home  Journal,  37 
Lalanne,  M. 

Etching  and  Tint,  iq6 

Soft  ground  etchings,  193 
Landscape,  artists,  80,  141,  165,  182; 
Dutch,  251 
Lane,  238 
Larson,  108 
Lavoignat,  34 
Leech,  49 
Legrand,  Louis,  182 

Maternity,  195 
Leighton,  Lord,  49 

Samson  Carrying  Off  the  Gates,  47 
Lemercier,  237 
Lepere,  Auguste,  72,  73,  124,  182 

Cathedrale    d'Amiens,    jour    d'in- 

ventaire,  183 

Notre  Dame:  LeSoir,  73 
Leveille,  32,  34 
Library  of  Congress,  43 
L' Illustration,  108 
Linnell,  237 

Lithograph,  120,  217,  223,  226,  229, 
230,  233',  234,  23s,  236,  239,  241,  242, 
243,  247,  248,  249,  250,  255,  257-  258, 
259,  260,  263,  264,  265,  266,  269,  270, 
281,  283,  284,  304 

Lithography,  15,  16,  227,  244-45,  273, 
277,  287,  290,  293;  art  of  multiplica- 
tion, 278;  The  Artists,  217-73;  differs 
from  etching  and  engraving,  246;  first 
book  by,  220;  invention  of,  218-37, 
278;  methods,  275-305;  photog- 
raphy, 218,  221;  secrecy  of,  255; 
steam  press,  218,  221;  theory  of,  237 
Loggan,  99 
Lorrain,  Claude,  24 

Pen  and  Wash  Drawing,  26 
Lucas,  David,  157 
Lungren,  Fernand,  85 
Lunois,  246 
Mahoney,  James,  44 
Mainz,  Gutenberg  Museum,  20 
Mallarme,  Stcphane,  253 
Manet,  Edouard,  50,  245 

Illustration  for  Poe's  "Raven,"  63 

Portrait  de  Femme,  240 


THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Maniere  noir,  158,  212 
Mantegna,  138 
Manuscript: 

Bible,  Page  from,  9 

Illuminated,  11 

Illumination  from,  21 

Miniature  from,  26 
Maris,  251 
Martin,  Henri,  246 

The  Vision,  247 
Mathey 

Portrait  of  Felicien  Rops,  187 
Maurou,  Paul,  247 
May,  Phil,  107,  125 

The  Parson,  106 
Meissonier,  J.  L.  E.,  34 

From  Les  Conies  Remois,  32 
Menzel,  Adolph  von,  a.  34,  243,  252 

The  Garden,  230 

The  Round  Table  at  Sans  Souci,  31 
Meredith,  George,  37 
Meryon,  C,  161-62 

The  College  Henri  Quatre,  160 
Metal:  engraving,  12,  15,  23,  29,  138; 
etching  on,  135;  plates,  279 
Methods:  early,  88;  European,  65,  91 ; 
French  and  English,  19,  2,S;  Japanese, 
iee  Japanese;  modern,  1-53,  6;  Span- 
ish, 80 

Mezzotint,    24,    157,    158,    159,    231, 
243-44 

Millais,    Sir   John    Everett,    37,    38, 
138,  238 
The  Sower,  40 

Millet,  Jean  Franjois,  245 
Miniature  from  early  manuscript,  26 
Monotype,  206 

Morris,  William,  11,  88,  91,  92,  96,  99, 
113;   books  of,  91 

The  Kelmscott  Chaucer,  go 

At  Hammersmith,  93 
Moxon,    edition    of    Tennyson,    34, 
35,  36 
Murray,  Fairfax,  88 

The  Kelmscott  Chaucer,  88 

Nanteuil,  138 
National  Art  School,  7 
National   Association    of    Employing 
Lithographers,  275 
Needle  point,  190 
Nevinson,  C.  W.,  262 
The  Road,  264 


INDEX 

New,  E.  H.,  q6 
Newberry  Library,  17 
New  York  Evening  Post,  114 
New  York  Times,  115,  120 
Nicholson,   William,   72,   124.     See 
Beggarstaff  Brothers 

London  Types,  70 
Niello,  136 
North,  I.  W.,  and  G.  I.  Pen  well 

English  Village,  48 

Once  a  Week,  37,  3g,  42,  85 
Orlik,  Emil,  66 

The  Seamstress,  67 

Painting,  19;    oil,  251;    for  reproduc- 
tion, 129,  131;   water  color,  251 
Paper,  215-16,  231 
Parsons,  Alfred,  87,  88 

Title-page  in  She  Sloops  to  Conquer, 

89 
Pen  drawing,  71,  80,  83,  84,  87,  89,  92, 
96,  97,  98,  103,  no,  112,  119,  244 
Pennell,  Joseph.  185,  272,  275,  276 

Doorway,  Rouen.  269 

Portrait  of,  by  Whistler,  257 

Printing  Shop,  273,  286 

Steam  Shovel,  Panama,  120 

Wood  and  Metal  Plates  and  Tools 

Used  in  Engraving.  13 

At  Work  on  a  Lithograph,  286 
Penwell,  G.  I.,  and  I.  W.  North 

EngHsh  Village,  48 
Philbrick,    Allen,     206;     method    of 
making  aquatint,  197 

Drawing  on  Paper  and  Print  from 

It,  297 

Sketch  of  Etching  Press,  213 

Photo-engraving,  71,  150 

Photography,  79,  86,  129,  131 

Piccolomini  Library,  Siena,  20,  22 

Pinturecchio,  20 

Piranese,  154 

Pissarro,  91 

Plantin    Museum,    16;     family,     29; 

printing  shop  of,  24 

Poe's  Raven,  59 

Posters,    256,    283,    284,    285,    300; 

early    French,    246;     Egyptian    and 

Assyrian,  8-1 1;  war,  251,  299,  300 

Pre-Raphaelites,  38,  49,  88,  238 

Press,  95,  103,  113,  128,  150,  209,  237; 

American,  19;    copper-plate,  281-82; 


313 

etching,  205,  213;  lithograph,  275,  282, 

30s;    modern  multiple  Hoc,   13;    old 

hand,  133,  153;  printing,  199;  steam, 

71 

Printing,  8,  15;   early,  88;   master  of, 

207.     5ge  Color  printing 

Prints,  12,  30.     5«e  Color  prints 

Process  block,  122 

Prout,  Samuel,  222 

The  Pump,  224 
Pryde,   James,    72.     See   BeggarstaS 
Brothers,  283 
Pryse,  Spencer,  262 

Belgium,  263 
Punch,  39,  49,  51,  107 
Pyle,  Howard,  91,  92 

Title    and    Illustration    to    Robin 

Hood,  93 

Rackham,  Arthur,  71 

Cinderella,  69 
Raffet,  A.,  228 

lis   grognaient    mais    ils    suivaient 

toujours,  226 

Rajon,  P. 

Bracquemond,  the  Etcher,  214 

Ramos,  Garcia,  108 

Regamy,  Felix,  59 

Rembrandt.  24,  44,  78,  136,  137,  138, 

141,  142,  143,  144,  147-  148,  149.  153, 

161,    166,    168,    177.    181,    182,    188, 

201,  202 

Christ  Presented  to  the  People,  146 

Drawing  in  Pen  and  Wash,  25 

The  Gold  Weigher's  Field,  140 

The  Mother,  14s 
Renouard,  Paul,  108,  in 

Purveyor  of  Liquid  Refreshments 

for  Anarchists,  in 
Retroussage,  209 
Rhys,  Grace,  102 

Ricketts,  Charles,  91,  124,  256,  258. 
See  Vale  Press 

Portrait  of,  by  Rothenstein,  258 
Rico.  Martin,  80,  86,  126 

Venetian  Canal,  81 
Ridley,  W.  M.,  43 
Rogers,  W.  A.,  104 
Romanticists,  33 
Rops,  Felicien,  178,  245 

The  Devil  over  Paris,  194 

The  Lace  Expert,  241 

Reading  the  Missal,  242 


314 

Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  34,  37,  238 

The  Palace  of  Art,  35 
Rothenstein,  William,  256,  261 

Portrait  of   Charles   Ricketts  and 

C. H.  Shannon,  258 
Rotogravure,  208 
Rowlandson,  154 

The  Sofa,  15s 
Rubens,  24 

Ruskin,  John,  158,  238;    Elements  of 
Drawing,  173 
Ruzicka,  71 
Ryerson  Library,  3  n.,  14,  66 

St.  Christopher,  first  wood  block,  10, 

12,  16 

Sandys,  Frederick,  37,  238 

The  Old  Chartist,  39 
Sargent,  256 
Sattler,  Joseph,  96 

Der  Wunderfarber,  97 
School  of  Lithography,  276;    at  Cin- 
cinnati, 273 
Schwabe,  Carlos,  100 

Illustration  for  Zola's  Le  Rive,  loi 

Scribe,  11 

Drawing  from  Manuscript,  1 
Scribe    at    Work,    from   Eleventh- 
Century  MS,  21 
Scribner's  Magazine,  50,  85 
Sculpture,  7,  19 

Senefelder,  Alois,  218,  231,  273,  281, 
282,  288,  293;  Grammar  of  Lithog- 
raphy, 219,  221,  222,  224,  225,  289, 
301 

Seymour,  162 

Shannon,  C.  H.,  91.  256.  See  Vale 
Press 

Shaw,  George  Bernard,  261 
Shields,  Frederick,  44 
Silhouettes,  69 
Smith,  Catterson,  88 

The  Keimscott  Chaucer,  88 
Smith,  F.  Hopkinson,  2,  no 
Smith,  Jessie  Willcox,  72 
Soft  ground,  182.     See  Etching 
South  Kensington  Museum,  49 
Spain,  80,  227 
Steel  engraving,  138,  215 
Steinlen,  Th.,  251 
18  Mars,  249 
Poster,  28s 


THE  GRAPHIC  ARTS 

Sterner,  276 

Stone,  218;    etching   on,  302;    Solen- 

hoefen,  289,  290;  transfers  on,  300 

Strixner,  219 

Studio,  66 

Sturgis,  Lee 

Etching  Press  Designed  and  Made 

by,  213 
SulHvan,  E.  J.,  109,  112 

Sartor  Resartus,  112 
Swain,  Joseph,  38,  39,  47 

Taylor,  Baron,  228 
Taylor,  F.  Walter,  109,  no,  256 
The  Nurse,  in 
Portrait,  127 

Tegner,  108 

Tenniel,  Sir  John,  49 

From  Alice  in  Wonderland,  47 

Tennyson,  Moxon's  edition,  35,  36 

Thompson,  Sir  Henry,  43 

Three-color  process,  132 

Tintoretti,  238 

Titian,  238 

Tone,  175,  207,  281,  290,  302,  304 

Touche,  304 

Toulouse-Lautrec,  Henri 
The  Printer,  217 

Treidler,  Adolphe,  271 

Tribune,  The  Chicago,  104 

Trollope,  38 

Turner,  J.  M.  W.,  30,  iSS,  158 

The  Junction  of  the  Severn  and  the 
Wye,  ISS  ,  .  J 

St.    Catherine's  Hill,   etching   and 
mezzotint,  iS9 

Twachtman,  John  H.,  277 

Unger,  Hans 
Head,  296 
Unzelmann,  34 
Utamaro,  56 

Vale  Press,  91 
Valloton,  F.,  77,  124 
The  Burial,  74 

VanDyck,  A.,  149,  15° 
Franciscus  Snyders,  151 

Vedder,  Elihu,  92 

Illustration  from  Omar  Khayydm,  94 

Velasquez,  78 


INDEX 

Venice,  80,  91,  153,  167 
Veth,  252 

Victoria  and  Albert  Museum,  49 
Vierge,  Daniel,  80,  85,  92,  126 

The  University,  82 
Vogel,  34 

Walker,  Fred,  38 

War  work,  113,  149,  251,  262;  propa- 
ganda, 251,  299 

Wash  drawings,  129.  See  Drawing 
Water  color,  299 
Way,  T.  R.,  252,  254 
Weir,  Alden,  138 
West,  221 
West  Point,  168 
Whirlwind,  253 

Whistler,  James  A.  McNeill,  38,  41, 
43.  56,  86,  99-100,  136,  138,  144,  147, 
154,  167-78,  181,  182,  199,  206,  207, 
212,  24s,  252,  255,  276 

Annie  Haden,  145 

Annie  Haden  in  the  Big  Hat,  172 


315 

Black  Lion  Wharf,  164 

Bowl  and  Jar,  41 

The  Doorway,  175 

The  Major's  Daughter,  42 

Portrait  of  Joseph  Pennell,  257 

Weary,  171 

Whistler  at  His  Press,  176 
Whymper,  Edward,  44 
Wilson,  Edgar,  59 
Wolf,  Henry,  50 

Woodblock:  cutting  on,  15;  descrip- 
tion, 12;  drawing  on,  50,  65,  66,  72, 
117,  122;  first,  10;  photographing 
on,  44 

Wood  cut,  5,  18,  113,  121,  133 
Wood  cutter,  59 

Wood  cutting,  3,  5-53,  11,  72,  78 
Wood  engraving,  5,  28,  30,  31,  32,  33, 
35.  36,  39.  42,  45,  48,  78,  79.  215 


Zinc,  291,  300 
Zorn,  A.,  181,  182,  185 
Portrait  of  Renan,  180 


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